Mix it up!

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Yesterday, I had the honor of welcoming four young artists in our home art studio for our first class of Mini Makers.  These 4-7 year olds showed up ready to create!  ​

Our theme was primary colors.  We were inspired by the book Mix It Up by Herve Tullet.  It’s simple and fun interactive book about coloring mixing.

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After reading the book together, the little artists were ready to do some color mixing themselves.  With this project, my goals were to teach how to use the paintbrushes and paint responsibly and to give the students a chance to experiment with mixing colors on their own.

We used liquid watercolors in red, yellow and blue (I love liquid watercolors because they create such vibrant colors, as long as you're painting on watercolor paper).

Before class, I put masking tape on the watercolor paper in the form of a grid, just to provide some something interesting to interact with (pro tip: anytime you paint with watercolor, it's a good idea to tape the paper onto a flat surface, so it doesn't curl as it dries).  The grid also made the one paper turn into 6 little spaces, and in each space they could play with a different combo of the primary colors.

And after the paint dries, taking off the masking tape is a different kind of magic.

(I used to do this same project with my Kindergartners when I taught elementary art full-time.  I originally got the idea from this blog post. )

After all that painting, we got some wiggles out by dancing to this super fun primary color song by OK Go.

From there, we dove into another primary-color-themed project, but I'll save that for the another blog post.