My 4 year old daughter loves to play pretend. One of her favorite things is to play school. This usually works pretty good for me because when I am teacher, she is attentive and listens. We had a geography lesson first, which went pretty well and then we went on to an art lesson.
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We went for a drive over the weekend and saw the gorgeous fall foliage. I don’t think that are many things more beautiful than a fall road. That was the inspiration for our art project for pretend school.
Our art lesson was quite theatrical, as she had me playing to a whole classroom of pretend students, some of which were getting paint in their hair and drinking the paint water. Art class ran long, but we had a lot of laughs and got a couple of great fall paintings out of it.
Here are the step by step instructions that I offered to my pretend art class and my one very real star pupil. Follow both of us through each step.
Paint a road about 3/4 of the way up the middle of a canvas with gray paint. Make it wide at the bottom and let it get narrower as you go up.
Dip the brush lightly in white paint. Tap your brush a little to blot paint and lightly brush up on your road. Add as many white strokes as you like and then do the same with black. No need to clean your brush between colors. Just let them blend. My daughter liked this. She thought that it made her road look cool.
Paint a rectangle with a triangle off to the right. My daughter designed her own house. She made a large red farm house with many peaks and a big chimney.
Draw a thick roof on the left of the triangle and a thin line to the right of the triangle.
Paint squares and rectangles onto the house for doors and windows.
Paint two yellow stripes onto the middle of the road and then two white stripes along the outside.
Make quick and short strokes in green along the sides of the road. Layer with yellow strokes.
With a long thin brush make long lines all around the sides of the road. Make them in front of your house as well. Use browns, grays or blacks or a combination of those. My daughter opted for blue tree trunks.
Paint branches coming out of them.
Crumple up a piece of craft tissue paper and dab into green, white and other assorted fall colors to make your ground cover. Dab all over the bottom of the canvas, along the sides of the road or where ever else grass should appear.
We used another technique that we used a few weeks back when we made our bundled Q-tip trees. We bundled up our Q-tips for this paint project again because it was such a quick and effective way to make lovely textured trees.
I thought that my daughter’s fall road came out amazing. She even went on to paint a couple more paintings.
She was so proud of each of her fall paintings and asked to hang them in her room. All three of them came out great. I definitely have a artist in the making.
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