Follow along to paint your own sand dollar in acrylics! You can download the template for the sand dollar outline below or draw your own!
What you need:
Canvas (I used an 8″x8″ stretched canvas)
Acrylic Paints – I used Apple Barrel craft paints in Bright Blue, Teal, White, & Black
Paint brushes
Sand dollar template (unless you’re drawing your own) & Pencil
Paper towels
Step one: Draw your sand dollar on your canvas or download the outline below – cut and trace onto your canvas or use transfer paper.
Step two: Mix together a little black paint with some blue paint to create a dark blue and fill your background and inside details with it!
Step three: Pain the white portion of your sand dollar with teal paint. Then double dip your brush into the teal and dark blue and add a layer onto your background – it’s okay to see brush strokes and areas of different colors! Don’t wash your brush – we need it for the next step!
Step four: Using the same brush in the previous step, without washing out the dark blue/teal paint, paint your sand dollar with white paint (if you have a lot of dark blue or teal paint left on your brush make sure to wipe some off before applying the white). By using the same brush some of the dark blue & teal paint will come through on your sand dollar – creating a more realistic texture and a painterly style! Once your layer of white is dry you can add more white to brighten some areas if needed!
This is an easy method to create a stained glass like piece of art! Stained glass artwork can be dated back thousands of years. Most traditional stained glass is created from cut pieces of colored glass brought together to create panels for decorative windows. For this project we will be inspired by stained glass to create a fun piece you can display in your window!
What you need:
Picture frame (Mine is 8″x10″ and came from the dollar store)
Colored tissue paper
Black construction paper or black card stock
Mod Podge (I used matte)
Paint brush
Scissors
Pencil
Stencil or template for your design
Step one: Cut out your design out of your black paper! You can use stencils, create templates or use cookie cutters to trace!
Step two: Take the backing off of your picture frame and carefully remove the glass. Glue your cut out on the glass with Mod Podge – applying a layer in the glass and then over your cut out.
Step three: Tear your tissue paper into smaller pieces – I tore mine into strips but you can make them any shape and in various sizes!
Step four: Using the Mod Podge, begin to glue down your tissue paper on your glass. It’s okay if your tissue paper covers your cut out and goes off the edge of your glass. You can also overlap your tissue paper – just keep in mind by overlapping new colors will be seen when held up to the light! Also be sure to add layers of Mod Podge between any overlapping tissue paper.
Step five: Once you have all the tissue paper you’d like on your glass, apply a layer of Mod Podge over the whole thing and let it dry!
Step six: Flip your glass over and trim off any pieces of tissue paper that went over the edge.
Step seven: Place your glass back in the frame – don’t add any of the backing, we want it to be just the glass so the light can come through! If needed, you can use some E6000, Goop Glue, or hot glue, to secure your glass in your frame!
Step eight: Set your picture in a sunny window! You can also glue a ribbon to hang it from, or depending on your frame, add eye hooks to attach a ribbon, chain or string.
Create some colorful window art with this simple method! You can hang your creations in a window or make them into a mobile! You can also use your colorful translucent wax papers for scrap booking and collage projects!
What you need:
Wax Paper
Crayons – with papers peeled.
Iron
Newspaper
String
Hole punch
Handheld pencil sharpener or Crayon sharpener
Scissors
Stencils, templates, or cookie cutters to trace for your shapes!
Pencil
Step one: Cover your work surface with newspaper and lay a piece of wax paper on top!
Step two: Using your hand held sharpener, sharpen your crayons over your wax paper. We want all the little shavings from the crayons on your wax paper! Keep in mind your crayon colors will get mixed together in our next steps!
Step three: Once you have quite a bit of crayon shavings covering your wax paper, lay another piece of wax paper on top and cover with more newspaper.
Step four: Carefully iron your wax paper to melt all those crayon shavings between your wax papers!
Step five: Let your paper cool off slightly and then remove the newspapers. Check out your awesome piece of translucent wax paper!
Step six: Use a stencil, template, or cookie cutter to trace a shape on your wax paper with a pencil. I made a fish template that I cut out of some card stock.
Step seven: Cut out your shapes, make a hole and add your string!
Step eight: You can hang your cut outs in a window just as they are or you can add them to a dowel or hoop (like an embroidery hoop) and create a mobile!
These colorful wax papers are also fun to use in scrap booking or collage projects too!
Create these awesome galaxy paintings just with some spray paint!
What you need:
Poster board (cut to your desired size)
Masking tape
Round lids from containers/jars, plastic bowls – These will get spray painted!
Plastic bag
Disposable gloves
Spray paint in various colors – I used yellow, blue, red, purple, black and white.
Step one: Make sure you have a work space set up outside – Spray paint travels, make sure you have a lot of space away from everything! You will need tape your poster board down, Glossy side up! I used a piece of plywood to tape mine to, cardboard would work as well! The tape will hold your paper flat and still as we work and also create a white border on you paintings!
Step two: Add a little color to your poster board with some of your spray paint. I used yellow and blue (we still want to see some of your paper).
Step three: Place some of your lids/bowls on your slightly colored poster board. These will become our planets and moons! Then spray your paper with some of your colors – it doesn’t need to be super dark yet, however, we can cover most of the white! Once you have it colored then remove your lids!
Step four: Spray paint your planets & moons! I like to keep one side of my planets lighter and make one side darker – this makes them look more like a sphere!
Step five: You can also create texture on your planets or moons by layering some colors quickly, then crinkle your plastic bag up and press it into the still wet spray paint. Immediately remove the plastic carefully.
Step six: Once you have your planets complete, cover them back up with your lids and bowls. Now spray your paper with black! Add other colors too to create nebula! I used blues, purple & pink! Overall we want your paper to be fully colored and on the darker side!
Step seven: When you’re happy with your background we’ll add stars! Make sure you have gloves on for this part! With your white spray paint, spray some paint onto your gloved finger tips – flick the paint onto your painting! Keep adding more until you have enough stars! Let your painting dry!
Step eight: When your paint has dried, remove the lids/bowls to reveal your planets and carefully remove your tape!
Most of you know I’m into art, some of you know I’m into food……if I can mix the two together – I will 😉 I enjoy cooking and making meals but I like baking most, and especially have fun with cake making. Specialty birthday cakes have always been a thing in my family and I can remember getting an awesome cake each year on my birthday as a kid. We’ve kept the cakes going…..and luckily I have decently sized family so there’s a fair amount of cakes to be made every year for birthdays and gatherings! My siblings also get in on the action to help with the cake creations so these cakes are definitely a collaborative effort – and it’s always nice to be able to get creative with them!
Most of our cake endeavors are purely trial and error mixed with a bit of research. And there have definitely been some cake fails over the years but they’ve only made us more creative with “cover ups”!
We use cake central a lot for recipes and tutorials, my favorite, quick, recipe for cake building and stacking is the original WASC cake. It’s easy, delicious, dense enough to carve, and it’s simple to make various flavors. This is typically the buttercream I use but it varies depending on what it’s being used for!
We “cheat” and use pre-packaged fondant & gum paste! – Fondant is what we’ve used to cover our cakes and create some of the sculptures with. Most fondant sculptures require an armature of some sort to support the fondant, while it does firm up some after setting out, larger pieces need some sort of support to keep it’s shape, and sometimes even with that we run into issues – humidity doesn’t help! For smaller, more delicate decorations, we use gum paste. You can make this paper thin to create flowers, cover armatures, and make toppers. The gum paste will dry out and become hard much faster than the fondant. Wilton brand is what what we use for both. Their fondant comes in large blocks of white and you can create your own colors or they have smaller blocks of various colors! The gum paste comes in a smaller tub of white and we mix our own colors. You can use regular food coloring but gel coloring works best! We use corn starch to keep our fondant and gum paste from sticking and a very small amount of water applied with a paint brush to stick pieces together.
Gumpaste Flowers
Buttercream covered cake with fondant decorations
Gumpaste flowers with petal dust coloring
Some additional cakes that use fondant…….
Armatures are created out of rice crispy treats or tin foil – depending on how edible we want our cake to be! As well as tooth picks, skewers, dowels, foam, & wires have all been used to make some of our armatures. Smaller creations don’t really need an armature but it’s nice to have a toothpick or dowel on toppers to make them easy to attach!
This guy was made from rice crispy treats and covered with fondant
For this cake we used a piece of plywood as the base and attached a length of wire covered with tin foil and fondant create the gravity defying effect!
Recently we’ve upgraded with an airbrush for some of our coloring techniques but for the longest time we used Wilton color mist and still do for some projects 🙂 We also use gel colors and petal dust for some of our decorations.
Gel coloring painted on a gumpaste cutout Airbrushed background with buttercream succulents!
Decorating or using candies and other food for cakes is also a fun way to get creative – the one below was inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art style that uses Benday dots and is an easy one to try at home – frost a sheet cake with white or light colored frosting. Create an outline of what you’d like to be on your cake with black string licorice, black fondant, or black frosting……since this style represents comic book art, some simple ideas would be a thought bubble, a word (like “ZAP”, “POW”, etc. in bubble letter form, or inside a thought bubble). This was a cake for my sister, so we did a portrait of her – comic book style 😉 Then use m&m’s and/or skittles to to create the Benday dots. You can see some areas where we had to cut the m&ms in half to fill smaller spots!
Cookies, cupcakes, and gingerbread – or really any desserts are just as fun too!! 🙂
In any case, definitely play with your food and turn it into a work of art 😉
One point perspective lettering is a fun and easy way to get started with perspective drawing and an element you can apply to other works of art! Check out the instructions and video below to create your own one point perspective words!
What is perspective drawing? When we look at something we see things a little differently then how they actually are – for example, we know that the edges of a road are parallel, but if we’re looking down the road, the edges seem to eventually come together and vanish at a certain point in the distance, making the road appear to get smaller and smaller the further away it gets. The same can be said if you look at houses lined up on a street – the house you’re closest to appears to be largest and the houses way out in the distance appear to be smaller, even though if you were to walk up to the houses in the distance, they would actually be the same size as the house that you’re closest to now! So in artwork when we want to achieve a realistic or dimensional look, if we’re able to create the appearance of what we see, rather than what we know, we can make a more convincing piece of art.
We know the edges of a road are parallel….
but when we look down a road, the edges seem to meet and disappear at a vanishing point in the distance.
VANISHING POINT: The vanishing point is that point in the distance where, in the example above, the edges of the road seem to disappear. In one point perspective drawing we only have one vanishing point – so we’re drawing objects or scenes directly from the front, or their true shape. For example (in the photos below) a cube with one point perspective will show a square at the front, whereas two point perspective will show the cube with the corner edge closest to you, making us able to see two sides of the cube, which each require their own vanishing point far off in the distance.
One Point Perspective
Two Point Perspective
EYE LEVEL LINE: We also use an eye level line (or horizon line) in perspective drawing. The eye level line is the height where your eye level is – we can determine if objects in your drawing are at eye level, above eye level, or below eye level, simply by drawing your objects on the eye level line, above or below the eye level line.
We can see the top of the bottom box because it’s below our eye level line. The box at eye level we can’t see the top or bottom of, only the side. And the top box we can see the bottom of but not the top because it’s above our eye level line – we have to look up at it!
Once you understand one point perspective it’s a lot easier to understand two point and multiple point perspective drawing!
In the video below I use one point perspective to make a word look 3D. You could also do your name or initials or apply the same method to geometric shapes! This is also only one way one point perspective can be used – you can also use one point perspective to create a landscape and other works of art too!
Ideas & Tips:
You can be more precise and measure out the area where your letters will be placed so they’re even in size!
If you have a longer word or your letters are closer together – Start with the letter that’s closest to the vanishing point when drawing the lines from the letter back to the vanishing point. Then work out from that letter. Letters that are closer together will often overlap when drawing the lines to the vanishing point. (For example the ‘E’ in ‘DREAM’ below overlaps the ‘R’ and the ‘R’ overlaps the ‘D’).
Try changing where your eye level line and/or vanishing point are on your paper to create different angels.
Stagger your letters so you have some at, above, and below, eye level!
Instead of letters you can try the same method with geometric shapes.
Some Student examples of one & two point perspective drawing!
This is a great way to use up any paper scraps you might have left over from some other art projects! Paper mosaics are easy and can be made simple or into more detailed pieces of art. A mosaic is simply a piece of art that has been put together using smaller pieces of tiles (usually, stone, ceramic, shell, glass), typically of different colors, placed closely together to create a larger image or design. Instead of the typical tile and grout we may think of for mosaics, this project uses pieces of colored paper arranged closely together!
What you need:
Scrap pieces of colored paper – You could also use magazines, junk mail, etc.
Glue stick
Scissors and/or paper cutter
Piece of card stock or thicker paper to complete your mosaic on (my piece is appox. 5″x7″) You could also make it into a greeting card!
Step one: Gather your scrap papers! You can either cut your paper into a lot of geometric shapes in various sizes, or plan out a design – cutting blocks of colors that will get cut smaller later.
Step two: Start to arrange your pieces of cut paper on your card stock. You want your pieces to fit together like a puzzle – leaving small even gaps of the card stock showing between your pieces. Flip, rotate, and trim pieces as needed!
If you’ve cut larger pieces for a pattern, you can start to cut and separate into smaller pieces. You can also draw an outline of a shape or object to fill in like in the video.
Step three: Get your cats to help you.
Step four: Once you have your pattern started you can begin to glue down pieces – remember to leave the gaps between your pieces! The better your pieces fit together the more even gaps you’ll create between them! Sometimes you might have to cut and add little tiny pieces to fill in gaps. This is what give us the mosaic effect!
Step five: Keep going until you have your entire pattern glued down!
Make some awesome artwork just with paper! You can turn your finished paper mosaics into greeting cards, framed art, or incorporate them into collage artworks or even create them on wooden boxes with mod-podge instead of glue sticks! 🙂
Bring on the summer vibes with this fun and easy painted flower pot!
What you need:
Terracotta flower pot – mine is approx. 6″
Krylon, indoor/outdoor, Gloss Clear Coat
Acrylic craft paints – I use Apple Barrel bran in Spring Green, Bright Red, & white.
Sharpie Marker
3/4″ Paint brush (or similar)
Step one: Paint the rim of your flower pot with green – also cover the rim on the inside portion of your flower pot too! (Note: if you’re re purposing an old flower pot make sure it’s scrubbed clean and dry!) It may require two coats of paint – in this case let your first layer dry completely before applying the second.
Step two: Mix together some red and white paint to create a dark pink color for your watermelon – add little bits of white to your red at a time until you get the color you’d like! Paint the whole bottom part of your flower pot with your pink color!
Step three: To add the light green stripes on the rim of your flower pot, mix a little white & green paint together. Once you have a light green, we want to use a “dry brush” technique for creating the stripes on your rim. This means that we don’t want a lot of paint on your brush and we want to see the texture of the brush stroke show up on your pot. To do this, wipe off most of the green paint from your brush and then paint your stripe! Remember we want to see the texture and create stripes that are all different!
Step four: Once your flower pot is completely dry, apply your clear coat. Let dry, and then using your Sharpie, draw your watermelon seeds!
Have fun creating this simple Summer project! Use your finished watermelon pot to hold pencils, start seedlings, as a cover for a plastic potted plant, to hold kitchen utensils, or just as a decoration!
Could you even fish for a better Dad? Make him a special Father’s Day card to let him know how Fin-tastic he is 🙂
What you need:
Card stock in the color you’d like for the outside of your card – 8.5″x11″, folded in half to make a 5.5″x8.5″ card
Card stock in the color you’d like for the inside of your card – 8″x10″, folded in half to make a 5″x8″ card
Watercolor paper – 8″x10″
Watercolor paint
Sea Salt (table salt can be used instead, however, the effect we’ll be creating will not be as dramatic)
A piece of a mesh onion bag (or any mesh bag you may get fruits of veggies in)
Tin Foil
Sharpies
Scissors
Paint Brushes
Pencil
Ruler
Glue stick & Craft Glue
MAKING THE WAVES:
Step one: Prepare your watercolor paints. I prefer watercolors from a tube and mix them with some water. I used cool colors – shades of blues, greens, & purples for my waves.
Step two: Cover your entire piece of watercolor paper with your paint – Work quickly to achieve a “wet on wet” technique where your colors will move and blend together while all your paint is wet!
Step three: While your paint is still wet sprinkle sea salt all over your paper! The salt creates a cool effect on your watercolor paint that gives us a unique look for your waves. Your paint still needs to be wet for the effect of the salt to work – the wet paint will pool around the pieces of salt, creating the textured effect! Adding too much salt can cause the effect not to show as well. If you only have table salt you will still get the effect just not as dramatic as the larger pieces of salt!
Step four: Let your paper dry completely – the salt effect works best if your paper dries naturally vs using a hair dryer to speed up the process (you can move onto one of the other card making sections for the time being). Once it’s dry, brush off the pieces of salt.
Step five: Cut your watercolor paper into stripes – you need one strip that measures 8″x 2″ and two strips that measure 8″x1.5″
Step six: On the back of your strips draw a wave pattern and cut out – you can use your first cut out wave to trace on your other strips or create a different pattern on each strip. I saved pieces of the wave I cut out to use a splashes of water later (you can also cut splashes out of your leftover watercolor paper).
MAKING THE CARD BASE:
Step one: Fold your card stock papers for the inside and outside of your card.
Step two: On the folded edge of your inside card stock, complete the measurements shown in the photo.
Step three: Cut on the lines shown in orange.
Step four: Open your card and fold in the sections cut in the last step – use your fingers on the back of your card to push the sections through. Fold the sections on your same center crease line, just in the opposite direction! Create new crease lines at the point you cut to. (The top image shows what your card should look like when it’s closed and the bottom image shows what it should look like open)
Step five: Fold your card back up and cut on the orange lines.
Step six: Open your card back up and fold in the sections you just cut – the same way you completed step four. You will have two sections to fold on each of your original sections or blocks. (The top image shows the cut lines before folding, the image on the right shows the folds, and the bottom image shows what your card should look like folded)
Step seven: Once you have cut and folded both sides your inside card is finished and should look like the photo!
MAKING THE FISH:
Step one: Gather your sharpies, tin foil and piece of mesh onion bag.
Step two: Tape your mesh to your work surface and then tape your tin foil on top.
Step three: Draw and color your fish on the tin foil with your sharpies – the mesh creates a scaly texture for your fish! My fish are not much larger than an inch.
Step four: Carefully cut out your fish!
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER!
Step one: Glue your fish to your wave pieces with a craft glue.
Step two: Glue each of your wave pieces onto the blocks you created.
Step three: Use a glue stick and add any splashes of water you’d like from your watercolor paper.
Step four: Close your card and using a glue stick, glue the inside card to your outside piece of card stock – your outside card is slightly larger so you’ll have a nice border around your inside piece!
Your card is complete! Decorate the front of your card and add a special message for your dad! Happy Father’s Day to all you Dads!
Scratch art or scratch board is a fun type of art where you typically scratch the surface of a paper or board, of a darker color, to reveal a lighter color or white. This easy project is a fun way you can create your own scratch art at home!
What you need:
Oil Pastels
Black Acrylic Paint
Card stock
Toothpick or Wooden Skewer
Paint Brush
Step one: Cut your card stock to the desired size (mine is approx. 6″x6″) and color it in completely with your oil pastels! Make sure to press firmly and fill in any white spots of paper.
Step two: Water down some of your black acrylic paint – we want to thin the paint out just a little but not enough that it’s dripping off your brush. Paint your entire piece of paper – going over the oil pastel you colored in the first step!
Step three: Let your paint dry and then use your toothpick or wooden skewer to scratch the black paint off the surface of your oil pastel! If you make a mistake you can cover it up with a little more black paint.
Continue scratching your design until you’re finished!
Not sure what to draw? Try a scratch art zentangle – check out this post on how to create a zentangle and apply the method to your scratch art! Send me photos of your scratch art to add to the followers gallery!
