Tutorial: Needle Felted Robin Earrings

Merry Christmas everyone! 

As a Christmas gift, here is an in-depth tutorial for some festive needle felted robin earrings. They're easy to make and should take about an hour - they took me an hour and a half, including taking photographs on timer and writing down all the steps on my ipad. 

Click here to download the pdf

Alternatively, you can access the tutorial and others on the Resources page of my website.

Have fun! Any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. 

Activity: Chinese New Year Paper Lanterns

A little late (I've been busy) but here's a quick art activity I threw together as a back-up plan for my friend, who's currently doing relief teaching in primary schools. 

So here we have paper lanterns with snakes – obviously open to lots more decoration, this example was put together in under 10 minutes! – and designed to be easy enough for six year olds with the minimum of messy art supplies to stress out a relief teacher. The theme is (I hope obviously) the Chinese Year of the Snake:

Here's a step-by-step animated gif:

1. 

Print out the lantern template (provided at the bottom of the post) onto coloured paper. Alternatively you could measure the sections yourself. (I'm using A4 paper, and I cut a 2.5cm strip off the long side for use as a handle, folded the remaining paper in half lengthwise, and cut strips over the fold, at 1.5cm intervals, stopping 2.5cm from the edge.)

At this point the lantern can be decorated with paints or textas. 

Fold the paper in half along the dotted line. 

2. 

Cut along the lines, starting at the fold.

3. 

When you unfold the paper, you can roll it up and glue it to form a lantern.

4. 

Add the handle at the top.

5. 

Draw a long wiggly snake on some coloured paper, and decorate it. 

6. 

Cut out your snake.

7. 

Add some dots of glue at intervals along the back of the snake. It's important not to put glue everywhere, as when the snake is attached to the lantern, you want to glue it down with the glued bits closer together than they really are, so the spaces in-between loop up and look more lively.

8. 

Attach the snake to the lantern, and make more snakes to attach.

Lantern Template

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Activity: Fireworks Over Perth

I put together an art project as a test for my mother to use in her class, based on something I vaguely remember doing myself in year 2. That was (horrors!) nearly 20 years ago, so I improvised quite a lot. =P

I set my camera up and was filming it so I could get process screenshots, but it turned itself off half way through (for no apparent reason, full battery, empty SD card....) which I, seated in front of it, didn't notice. So I'm afraid the process shots stop abruptly halfway through. 

This is the final product, using wax resist and collage, with embellishments and an exploration of mirroring. It's intended to be the Skyworks Fireworks over Perth and the Swan River on Australia Day, but it can be any city.

You Will Need:

Thick paper

Black paper/card

Crayons or oil pastels

Paint and brushes

Scissors, pencil & ruler

Glitter pens

Step 1:

Find the midline in a piece of sturdy paper. I'm using 300gsm watercolour paper here; the thinner the paper, the more it will buckle when wet.

Step 2:

Using a white crayon or oil pastel, draw some fireworks in the top half of the paper. Press nice and hard so lots of wax gets on the paper.

Step 3:

Now use coloured crayons/oil pastels and draw the same fireworks in colour. Try and put the coloured lines between the white lines, but it doesn't matter if they overlap a bit. 

Step 4:

Now draw the coloured fireworks upside down on the bottom half of the paper. These are the reflections, so you draw each firework directly below the 'main' firework, upside down. Check where each firework is in relation to the middle line, and if it's close, you draw the reflection close, and if it's far away, you draw it far away.

Step 5: 

Now use a waterbased paint (I'm using Ecoline ink, but watercolour, edicol dye, poster paint and watered-down acrylic will work just as well.) and paint a dark blue over all of the paper. The wax will resist the paint and you will see your fireworks.

Step 5: 

Put the wet paper aside to dry, and get a piece of black paper or cardboard the same width as the painted paper. Fold it in half.

It was at this point that my camera died, so you'll have to bear with me.

With the black paper still folded, draw the outline of a cityscape on one side. Make sure you don't draw all the way down to the fold, keep some short buildings so that the city stays in one piece when you cut it out. 

Step 6:

With the paper still folded, cut out the city around your lines. When you are finished, unfold the paper and you will have two cities, mirror images of each other, joined together like paper dolls. 

Step 7:

Use a yellow oil pastel (or some poster paint, acrylic, whatever) to draw some yellow windows onto your city

Step 8:

Now for the tricky part. The upside-down city is the reflection in the river, so chop it up a bit. Glue the intact city onto the paper so that the fold line is on top of the middle line on your painting, and then put the reflection back together. It doesn't have to be perfect, and make sure you leave spaces between the pieces, so it looks like the reflection is broken up by the water. 

Step 10:

Lastly, add some glitter to the fireworks in the sky. I used a glue pen and loose glitter, but glue pens would be just as good, and much less messy – I just didn't have any to hand. With the three layers to the fireworks (white, colour and glitter) you get a more three dimensional effect.

And you're done! 

If you use these instructions, or have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. =)

Other activity posts:

Haunted House Painting

Screaming Bookmarks

Jacaranda Seed Christmas Decorations

Or click the 'activities' tag to your right =)

Activity: Jacaranda Seed Christmas Decorations

We've had high winds the last couple of days, which blew down a lot of jacaranda seed pods in our front garden, so here's a method for turning them into Christmas decorations:

Find yourself a nice seed pod, and drill a hole in the top. They're quite slippery little suckers to drill through, so take care! 

Cover your seed pod with silver paint. I'd recommend spray paint, but I didn't have any, so I used silver acrylic, two coats.  

Paint a pattern on both sides with red acrylic.

This is the pattern I used. 

Add details in white acrylic, and thread a red ribbon through the hole you drilled.

Hang!

You could also make a garland of these, perhaps spelling out 'Merry Christmas' or something. And of course, with other patterns and colour combinations, the possibilities are endless. =)  

Activity - Haunted House

I did a test run for an art activity for my mother's year 3 class, and thought I'd post the steps here as well. =) In honour of Halloween, here is a haunted house inspired by the fabulous Jan Pienkowski. 

If you haven't seen Jan Pienkowski's lovely silhouette illustrations, here's a sample:

Image from www.janpienkowski.com

And on to the walk-through:

You will need: 

Paper – watercolour paper is best, but anything reasonably thick that can withstand getting wet would be okay. 

Paint – Watercolour, Ecoline Ink, Edicol Dye, watered down acrylic... anything like that. 

Sharpie

Waterproof fineliner

Brush – preferably one that's quite large.  

My mother will be using cut-out black paper for her class to make the silhouettes, but I opted for doing everything on the one piece of paper (in this case an A6 offcut of watercolour paper).

First I planned the house with pencil, incorporating as many scary things as  I could. 

Then I inked the outlines with a waterproof fineliner (except for the moon, which I coloured with a waxy white pencil to resist the paint later on)

Then I washed over everywhere with ecoline ink (watercolour or edicol dye should work just as well, I was just after something fast).
I started with yellow, and while it was still wet I added orange. I then loaded my brush with plenty of water and red ink, and touched it to the wet paper to make little dots that spread on contact with the water. I avoided painting the moon, but the wax meant that paint didn't soak in to the paper there anyway. The blobby look was the closest I could get to marbling without actually marbling. 

This is the result. Let it dry.

I then took a good old Sharpie and coloured everything in so that I had a solid silhouette. 

And here's the final product. As you can see there are more variations in the sky than there are in the scanned version. Scanners do not like watercolour paper. 

I coloured in the silhouette after I'd painted the background because Ecoline ink can be a bit shiny, and I wanted a good solid black without any watermarks in it. 

2011's Halloween Post.

2010's Halloween Post.

Screaming Book Week Bookmarks

It's Children's Book Week here in Australia (and also the National Year of Reading) and if you ask me there just isn't enough stuff around for it. It's such an important thing, to try and get children interested in reading, but compared to the stuff I see for equivalent events in the UK and America (the web is good for breeding discontent!) we don't make such a big deal of it. Which is a shame.

So I thought I'd do a few Book Week posts. First up, some screaming bookmarks. I'm really rather busy at the moment, so I didn't have time to do anything particularly inspired, but these always go down well. I first learnt how to do them from the fabulous British tv show Art Attack, when I was little. I couldn't find the video on youtube, so I've made up my own instructions. Credit for the original idea goes to the show, though. =)

The bookmarks are made to print on A4 paper (open in a new tab or window to get the full size), and they're a nice high resolution so that you'll get nice clean lines. You can use them for home or school use, anything that's non-commercial, but I do ask that you don't remove my logo and credit line. 

For those of you who haven't heard of the 2012 Book Week theme, it's 'Champions Read!'

And here are the instructions:

These were drawn in Adobe Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3.