I really enjoy following Jean Van’t Hul over at The Artful Parent. She has some fabulous ideas, and I have really become much more of an artful parent since following her blog. She had a fun idea about making some Easter egg window decorations, and I took that idea and turned it into a flower window decoration instead.
Becca really enjoyed going out to collect random flowers in a little baggy, and then we carefully deconstructed them for use in our art. She held the marker and guided the drawing as I assisted in making a flower design on our contact paper. She then helped put the wildflowers around randomly, and I covered them and cut them out, and then hung on our deck patio door. They are so pretty, and I really enjoy looking at them as I go by. They remind me that spring is here! I used Washi tape to make the stems and leaves, and I did Washi around one flower as Jean suggests in her blog, but then just left the other one b/c it was really hard to make it look the way I wanted in the design we chose to do.
This is a super fun and easy way to make a connection between the outdoors and an indoor art project. For us, I knew it was going to rain, so one afternoon we did the collecting, and the next afternoon while we watched the rain, we made the flowers and thought about spring! It was fun to watch the wheels turning in her mind as she talked about how the rain coming down was going to help the flowers grow more and more. She got so excited. And she was super excited to show our flowers to Daddy when he got home from work! 🙂
Please note – I typically do art projects where the end result is open-ended, and give Becca very little instruction. For this project, I showed her the blog post and Jean’s pictures before we ever started so that she’d have an idea of what we were going for in the finished product. She seemed to really appreciate having some direction, but also totally did her own thing, which was good. So it was sort of product AND process art since we had an end goal in mind and both knew what we were going for (and had to follow specific directions and steps to get to that goal), but it was also process art because it was more about the journey than what it actually turned up looking like in the end. 🙂
Butterbees and Bumbleflies 