Mar 31, 2011

Arts & Crafts Heart Butterfly and Heart Baby

Make a Butterfly and a Baby. All you need is canvas, paint, decorative ribbon, beads, and wooden hearts. It's very simple to make and a lot of fun. You can give these away as gifts or sell them for extra cash.







Kids Crafts Teach Someone Their Basic Colors Easy Crafts

Help someone learn their colors! You can make a small book or even make flash cards. All you need is card stock paper, craft paper, and a pen for writing. Use common items to represent each color like the sun is for yellow and a heart is for red. This is a quick and easy way to teach someone about different colors.
















Mar 14, 2011

Honeysuckle Pink Arts & Crafts Sun

This was a project surrounding the color of the year, HoneySuckle Pink. I used a complementary color scheme of Red Orange and Blue Green. I decorated the piece with blue green flowers and beads and I used an upside sparkly pink heart for the nose.

All you need is for this project is a canvas, acrylic paint, decorative flowers, and beads. You can make this and give it away as a gift or make it to sell for extra money $$$.






Make an Arts & Crafts Guitar

Make an Arts & Crafts Guitar. All you need is acrylic paint, canvas, beads, ribbon, and hot glue. This was make with a color square using Red-orange, violet, blue-green, and yellow. I added white to those colors to lighten the color scheme. The guitar is HoneySuckle Pink. Pantone.com has voted this the Color of the year 2011. I made HoneySuckle pink by adding white to Red-Orange.



Valentine's Day Arts & Crafts

These were easy to make crafts that did not cost a lot of money to make. Most of the craft supplies I already had around the house. I only had to buy the picture frame and the candy. Here’s the video that shows step by step how I made these Valentine’s Day Arts & Crafts Project.







Why Some of Van Gogh’s Paintings are Fading

Recently, some of yellows in Van Gogh’s paintings have turned to brown. Chemists using X-Ray machines discovered that a chemical is the root cause of the discoloration. They discovered the problem was two fold. First, Van Gogh added white to his yellow paint to create the bright lemon colored yellow that characterised many of his paintings. Second, the type of paint he used is contributing to the browning of the yellow. Back then, many artists used these lead-chromate paints.  The Chemists actually obtained some of this old paint from a museum and they found that when they added white to the yellow and subjected it to ultra violet rays, the yellow paint quickly turned brown.
 
 
 

Support Art Education

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. We were all taught these are the main learning essentials. It’s true, they are very important. However, art and music are also. It’s a proven fact that children that receive art education have a more creative approach to other subjects than other children that do not receive this type of education. In a recent study, children that listened to Mozart, scored higher on standarized tests than children who did not?

Sadly, whenever it’s time for budget cuts, Art and Music is often the first to go. I can remember back in elementary school, we only had art and music classes once every two weeks. Later on I found out that we were actually sharing them with four other schools in the same county. I valued the art and music lessons that I received, but I wonder how much more could I have learned had it been a regular part of the curriculum?

Make Crafts from Greeting Cards

Make crafts from the designs from greeting cards. All you need is greeting cards of your choice, craft paper, ribbon, decorative beads paint, and craft glue. Here, I got my color scheme from the stripped decorative craft paper I had. The colors were orange, pink, green, yellow, and white.






Mar 13, 2011

Georges Seurat 1859-1891

Born in 1859, Georges-Pierre Seurat grew up in a wealthy family in Paris, France. He later studied art with Justin Lequien, a sculptor. After a brief stint at a Military Academy, he returned to his art in 1880. After being rejected by the Paris Salon, a French institution of art patronage that exhibited the work of unknown artists, he studied with independent artists who shared his ideas for creativity. He became friends with Paul Signac. Together they developed the pointillist style of painting. Pointilism is when you use dots to paint rather than brush strokes. It’s very time consuming but the style produces beautiful and unique paintings. In the Summer of 1884, he started working on his masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte”. The 10 foot long painting took him 2 years to complete. The painting is now located at the Art Institute of Chicago.


Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte

Seurat died in 1891 at the age of 31. It is belived that he probably died from diphtheria. He left behind a wife and a young son, Pierre Georges.

Painting by Seurat’s Friend, Paul Signac “Felix Feneon”

HoneySuckle Pink Color of the Year 2011


According to Pantone.com, the color of the year for 2011 is Honeysuckle Pink. This is a beautiful and rich reddish pink. It’s a bold and confident color, yet it’s quiet enough for everyday use. You will be seeing alot of Honeysuckle Pink this year in clothing, home interior, and makeup. This color works very well with bronze, green, white, grey, brown, black, and beige. It’ll add a great splash of color to any canvas. For Artists, this color can be made by adding white to red-orange.

This is from the show Color Splash with David Bromstad on HGTV. He paired the lovely honeysuckle pink with a vibrant yellow green. It all works well with the neutral but lovely chocolate colored sofa. The white cream pillows and the white chandelier keeps the color scheme very clean and crisp. This is very nicely done.