My daughter and I love the famous artists. We also love playing around with different paint techniques. We combined the two for these Monet inspired landscape sponge paintings. The sponge created a wonderful backdrop for these impressionist style paintings. We chose Monet’s Water Lilies and Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies as our inspiration. These were quick, fun and easy, albeit a little bit messy, but we were both delighted at how they came out.
Here is a fun and funky Easter project for art lovers. My daughter and I had fun making these Picasso inspired Easter bunnies. Use paints, markers, gel pens or crayons to make your Easter bunnies. Check out some of our other artist inspired projects.
Our projects are often inspired by the great artists. Last year, we made leaf and pumpkin pop art inspired by Andy Warhol. We were inspired again this year to mix pumpkins with various famous artist styles. These artist inspired pumpkin crafts are easy, cute, colorful and perfect for this time of year.
Our little girl loves books. She has gone through many different favorites in her five years on this earth. They usually change from week to week. Ever since we have gotten into chapter books though, there has only been one favorite and that is Captain Underpants. She cannot get enough of him and his sidekicks, George and Harold. We have read them all. She draws the characters all the time and the characters have even inspired her to want to become a comic book writer. We went to a local farm this weekend and stocked up on pumpkins. Since my girl loves that whacky superhero so much, I thought that I would make her a Captain Underpants pumpkin to greet her as she leaves the house and comes home from school every day. His simple features made this an easy and fun painted pumpkin.
It brings me so much joy knowing that my daughter loves art as much as I do. My five-year old spends the vast majority of her free time drawing, painting or crafting. It is wonderful to be able to share this with her.
I introduced her to the great artists early on and her curiosity and love for them has grown and grown. She wants to read books about them (We included a list of some of our favorite kid’s book about famous artists at the bottom of the post.) and look at pictures of their different artwork. She wants to know everything about them and loves trying to recreate their work and experiment with each artist’s techniques. It is amazing. Sufficed to say, artist inspired art projects have quickly become a favorite in our home. Here is a great collection of some of our favorite artist inspired projects for kids.
We love finding inspiration for arts and craft projects from the books that we read. One of our new favorites is ‘Art & Max‘ (affiliate link). It is a wonderful book about two lizards. One is an artist and the other is an aspiring artist. When Arthur (Art) suggests that Max paint him, things quickly get colorful and then begin to slowly unravel. The lines and the colors in the book inspired these yarn art creations.
Moana is the new favorite movie in our house. My daughter just can’t get enough of it. There are so many wonderful songs and characters in the film. The funniest of the characters are the coconut pirates called the Kakamora. They are cute and deadly.
My daughter and I both wanted to make a craft inspired by the nutty pirates. I had an idea to make them out of a paper plate. My daughter had an entirely different idea in mind. She wanted to make hers with foam and paper. Here is how they both came out. Also, check out our Moana inspired flower crown.
We were lucky enough to get out to the movies this weekend and see the new ‘Beauty and the Beast’ movie. I am a big fan of the animated version, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about the live action movie, but I loved it. It was absolutely beautiful. I love all of the characters from the movies, so it is hard to pick a favorite, but if I had to pick just one, it would have to be Chip. He is just so cute. I couldn’t resist making a teacup craft inspired by my favorite little teacup.
My daughter and I stumbled across a book at the library a couple of weeks ago and it quickly became a new favorite of ours. Emily’s Blue Period (affiliate link) is a lovely book about a young girl who wants to become an artist and is studying the works of Pablo Picasso. Emily is also struggling with big emotions about her parent’s recent split. The book discusses Picasso’s blue period, his work in collage and his Cubism style of art. My daughter, like the young girl in the book, became fascinated by Picasso. We flipped through his artwork online and read more about him. This weekend, after reading the book for the umpteenth time, she wanted to make a “cube” project.
My daughter loves Dr. Seuss. Whenever we go to the library, she always looks through his books for one that we haven’t read in a while or for an old favorite. The Lorax is one of those favorites. It is a favorite of mine as well.
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We have been on a huge mixed media kick lately and I thought that the truffula trees from ‘The Lorax’ would make a beautiful project for us to do together.