An Easy Art Project

     We do art every Monday, and this includes learning about our Artist for the semester, picture study, and also working on our own creative projects.  For this Monday's art project I got the idea to do oil pastel and water color pictures from this Monet inspired project at Art Projects for Kids.
    I chose to do trees instead of lilies, and sent the kids outside while I got everything set up. I drew a tree out-line with a sharpie pen on all three of their sheets, although obviously the twins could care less.

     Anna worked on a sheet of watercolor paper, and the twins had thick drawing paper.  I had blue acrylic paint in a jar, watered down to resemble watercolor, and a selection of green, brown, orange, and red oil pastels in the middle of the table.  Samuel didn't lose any time in getting a big handful of colors to start with.

     Both Abriel and Samuel worked industriously, and only occasionally tried to eat the pastels and grab the jar of paint.

     After Anna was finished with her tree, I gave her a big wash brush, and told her to paint all over her picture.  She looked a little dubious until I explained that the oil pastels repel water, and so the paint would not stick to her drawing.  She liked the cloudy effect it gave her sky.

Then I temporally lost my sanity, and allowed Samuel and Abriel to put a wash on theirs.  (With my help)  Samuel did pretty good...

 Abriel on the other hand did not.  She refused to let me help her, and seemed very into dumping the whole jar of paint on her picture.  It ended in her screaming as I wrestled the paint brush out of her death grip; so I learned my lesson about that. 
    I hung the finished pictures on the wall, where they look very pretty.