Even though my kids are young, I firmly believe that children are never too little to be exposed to advanced concepts. They may not grasp the information in its entirety, but giving them a taste of higher learning helps build knowledge, vocabulary, and self-awareness as they attempt to imitate new techniques. My husband is always really great at not dumbing things down when he talks to the kids and because of that Aurora and Grayson know lots of interesting facts! So, when I thought about how I wanted to dye our Easter Eggs this year, I decided to try and infuse a bit of learning in with the fun and teach the kids a few new art techniques.
I’m no art teacher, but with a little googling I was able to come up with six different styles of painting for us to base our lesson off of. We explored six different art supplies and six famous artists in this unique art history lesson.
We used chalk pastels dipped in water to create these cubism eggs. I showed the kids a few pictures by Pablo Picasso and we talked about how he used a lot of sharp angles and unique colors, then we set off making our own Easter eggs inspired by his designs.
We made these eggs immediately after boiling them, so they were still hot when we started to drawn on them with our crayons. Pointillism is the use of many dots to create a larger image. The famous picture, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat, inspired these Easter eggs.
Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are some of my favorites, the movement in Starry Night is breath taking! We used liquid watercolors to imitate this technique on our Easter eggs. I was trying to make a flower… not sure if that comes across or not!
These watercolor crayons were really fun to play with! First, you draw with them as you normally would, and then you can blend and paint by adding a little bit of water. You can also dip the crayon straight in to the water for a different look. We used these watercolor crayons on our Easter eggs to make Fauvism styled eggs similar to Henry Matesse’s work.
Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism paintings are really fun to imitate. This style of splatter painting can make anyone feel like an artist! We used pipettes to drip liquid watercolors on to our eggs. You could also just splash the paint on, flinging flecks wildly and that would be perfectly in keeping with Pollock’s work!
Pop art is so much fun! Andy Warhol is one of the most fun artists to imitate because his works are so playful! Much of his art consists of repeated images appearing in a grid with funky colors and so we used fluorescent paint to color each fourth of our eggs and then drew a hearts in each quadrant. This paint is really cool, it glows super bright under a blacklight flashlight!
Aurora is my little artist and really loved trying the new techniques I showed her! Grayson is still a bit young for the fullness of this project, but he enjoyed trying out each of the different art supplies I brought out and ended up making more of a “mixed media” egg project! All in all, we have lots of colorful Easter eggs to enjoy now, I think I’m going to have to plan a few egg salad lunches to make the most of them!
