Composite Head Collages - Art for Children - Arcimboldo

Materials: 

• Different colors of construction paper
• Glue sticks
• Scissors (child safe if appropriate)
• Magazines or catalogs (seed catalogs would be especially good) for cutting apart
• Books about the artist (see suggestions below)
• Video links and websites.

Project: This is a very simple, cut and glue, collage art project based on the composite heads of the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Review some, or all of the books, videos, and websites linked below with your children.

Cut out as many pictures of fruits, vegetables, flowers, or really any other items desired, as you can find in your magazines.  Older children can do their own cutting, but you will probably want to present younger children with a pre-cut selection of pictures.

Provide an assortment of construction paper or card stock sheets with glue sticks, and let the children go to town piecing together faces from the fruits and flowers.

Book Suggestions:

Hello, Fruit Face!  The Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo by Prestel Adventures in Art.

Sticker Art Shapes:  Arcimboldo by Louise Cognard - This entire series has been a big hit in our house.

Video Links:

Arcimboldo: Nature and Fantasy, from the National Art Museum's online resources for their Arcimboldo exhibit, narrated by Isabella Rossellini.

And, one more from YouTube, featuring teams of children designing different faces using the same basket of play fruit.  It's a little long and slow, but makes for good discussion of how the same items can be used create very different faces depending on the eye of the artist.

Website Suggestions:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo the Complete Works

The Denver Art Museum: a printable lesson plan for young children.

Do Art!: a very similar project to the one above, but with a little more detail to interest older children.

Let's Face It: A lesson plan with pictures of fruit and vegetables included to be cut out and used.

The Child's Paper Academy: A short lesson, some additional links, and more collages (theirs are very good).

An Arcimboldo Coloring Page

Art Projects for Kids:  A short lesson idea, and a printable 40''x48'' mural to color (downloadable for $5.00 - we've done one of her murals in the past, it was worth every penny).

This sort of project is an unschoolers dream, because it presents so many jumping off points for further study - symmetry, zoology, botany, the Age of Discovery, the Hapsburg Empire, Leonardo da Vinci, the modern surrealists, and so on and so on to wherever fancy and imagination takes you.

 It's great to be an homeschooler.

Easy Dinosaur Fossil Birthday Cake

Pipe melted peanut butter chips, or white chocolate chips if you prefer (about a third of a bag) from onto a plastic freezer bag (or parchment paper if you have any), placed over a dinosaur skeleton coloring sheet (like this one) to use as a guide.  Allow the peanut butter "bones" a few minutes to harden up...

 ...and then plop them right into the frosting of your otherwise ordinary birthday cake (in our case a round, double-decker, chocolate cake with chocolate - or rather dark chocolate - peanut butter frosting), and top with a generous handful of crumbled chocolate sandwich cookies...

...to complete the transformation of an unassuming, everyday, frosted cake into a dinosaur lovers delight.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Crochet Unicorn Pattern Link

After crocheting a blessing/herd of unicorns to give out to the girls' friends for Christmas...

...I feel very good about recommending the free pattern from Sheep Dog's Fleece (click here to go there).  It's a beginner level project, and the pattern instructions are clear, and easy to follow. There is a fair amount of fiddly sewing together though - so allow a little extra time for completion if you decide to make a unicorn for everyone you know.  Believe me, it's next to impossible to make just one.

Oh, and don't worry if the head looks too small for the body when you attach it - by the time you get the mane on, it will look just right.

Merry Christmas! And, a big thanks to Sheep Dog's Fleece for the fantastic pattern and inspiration.

Preschool Egg Carton Manger Craft

For the preschool Sunday school class:

A googly eyed cotton ball "baby"...

...wrapped in toilet paper "swaddling clothes"...

...secured with a small piece of tape...

...and laid in a manger...

...made ahead of time, out of an egg carton, cut apart...

...and trimmed, so each cup has one side left sticking up, like a spoon handle...

...filled with ripped up, paper bag, "hay" (children can rip up the paper, and fill their mangers, while the googly eye glue dries on their cotton balls)...

...then topped off with a shiny star, cut out ahead, from tinfoil, or in our case - recycled chocolate wrappers, glued onto the egg carton "handle".

Any theological discussion as to when and where the star should actually appear in the Christmas story can probably be left to the grown-ups, or at least the upper elementary classes - but that's up to you.

Merry Christmas from Almost Unschoolers!

Washable, Color Your Own Doll, Craft

Here's one for those of you scrambling to craft up a homemade Christmas, or trying to put together a few extra gifts to have on hand.

This time of year I start sorting through my craft closet, with potential presents in mind, which is how I happened to find myself sitting in front of my archenemy - the sewing machine - with a scrap of white fabric, left over from some forgotten craft project or other, just waiting to be turned into a doll.  My sewing skills are sadly insufficient to the task, so the little dolls I came up with are sort of strange, but the girls loved them - so no judging!

I had them draw large paper dolls for me...

...to cut out, and trace onto the fabric...

...as a pattern (two for each doll).

Then, I sewed the pieces together...

...and stuffed them with polyfill.  If your sewing skills are as lacking as mine, I would suggest using a nice simple doll pattern, in a largish size, for slightly more normal looking dolls.

But really, my girls didn't seem to notice how oddly shaped, and lumpy their new dolls were, once I handed them the pack of washable markers...

...and told them they could draw the faces, hair, and clothes on for themselves.

We let the marker dry for a few seconds, before the played with the dolls...

 ...and much to my relief, the dry marker didn't come off on the girls' hands, but did rinse right off in the washing machine, in cold water (it might take two washes, depending on the colors used)...

...creating a clean slate for the girls to decorate again.

Not too bad for a scrap of cotton fabric, a couple of handful's of polyfill, a box of markers, and a rather frustrating hour, or so of sewing time.  I'm even thinking a couple of the old pillowcases taking up space in the linen closet might have to become color-your-own dinosaurs in time for Christmas, evil sewing machine, with it's wicked empty bobbin, not withstanding.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Homemade Holiday Scented Crayons

C was busy coloring in a sheet of gingerbread men, when she commented on how much better it would be if her picture smelled like gingerbread too, and I thought...

...why not?  We've made scented everything else - play dough, finger paint, even wrapping paper...

...why not crayons?  There are plenty of posts out there with instructions for melting, and remolding your children's left over crayon bits. I usually go for the melt-in-the-oven method, but this time I tried out the fast and easy crayons-in-a-can-placed-in-a-bowl-of-boiling-water...

...but added in a few shakes of cinnamon...

...what amounted to about 2 teaspoons of spice per four or five crayons worth of bits...

...before melting the crayon, and pouring the scented wax into a mini cookie cutter with the bottom wrapped in tinfoil...

...to cool and harden...

...into a festive shape.

We followed our cinnamon crayon up with mint (made with two teaspoons of mint extract added to green crayons), and hot chocolate (made with a couple of teaspoons of hot chocolate mix added to brown crayons).  I was all set to make up a black licorice crayon, when I realized I was all out of anise extract, and so decided to call it a night.

I'm sure any of the oils designed for making scented candles would probably work to make scented crayons just as well, but I love finding things right in my own kitchen that can be reworked into fun little presents like these.

You can really smell the mint and cinnamon, even on the paper, though the chocolate is a little more subtle.  I had the Man of the House give them a quick, blind-folded sniff.  He identified the mint right off, and the cinnamon after a second smell, but he guessed the chocolate was vanilla - still a nice scent.

Needless to say, C was thrilled to be able to draw mint trees with cinnamon ornaments and chocolaty...or at least sweet smelling...trunks.

Happy fall from Almost Unschoolers!

Watermelon Fudge

For National Watermelon Day (no I'm not kidding), we loosely followed a recipe from Something Swanky, to transform the traditional 3 minute, 3 ingredient fudge we like to make at Christmastime, into a summer delight...

...by melting together sweetened condensed milk (14 oz), white chocolate chips (3 cups), and watermelon flavored candy oil to taste (we substituted a strawberry, watermelon water enhancer, because that's as close as we could come to a watermelon flavoring) in the microwave for...

...a minute and a half, or until the chips are completely melted, stirring after every thirty seconds...

...then dividing out a small portion (about 1/3 of the total) into two bowls, adding green food coloring to one bowl, leaving the other white, and dyeing the remaining portion red (with food coloring, and a few extra squirts of flavor if desired)...

...before layering them into a small loaf pan (we used a regular size loaf pan, and had to make additional red fudge, in order to make it thick (as in deep) enough, unfortunately adding too much sweetened condensed milk to the second batch, making for a gooey top, which you'll see in the pictures to come, but doesn't reflect on the original recipe), green first...

...then white...

...and red...

...allowing an hour in the refrigerator for the fudge to set up, before removing it from the pan...

...to slice into strips, and then wedges (every other one of which will look like a watermelon wedge, and all of which will taste good)...

...and top with mini chocolate chip "seeds".

Happy National Watermelon Day!