Spring Break Paint Projects

There's a lot of talk about art journals in the various articles I've been writing lately, but I haven't touched on my most recent experiments with them and my children. They're constantly watching me work in my "paint book," as they like to refer to my art journal. Often they've asked how they can work with one, so I decided to use spring break as my opportunity to teach them.

Breaking down the process:

To start, I decided to expand upon this project by making books for the kids to use rather than going out and buying one. This will give them a better understanding of paper choice, book construction and how everything works together. Here's how we created our books:

1: I brought them into my studio and showed them the different kinds of paper I use for different kinds of projects. We picked out a thick drawing paper to create our books from.

2: I save all different sized boxes from the kitchen, so we picked three cereal boxes to make the cover out of.

3: Each child selected their favorite colored construction paper to cover their cereal boxes with.

4: We collected glue sticks, safety scissors, rulers and newspapers (to cover our work spaces).

The first phase of the construction portion of this project is determining how many pages are going to be in the book, then folding the drawing paper in half. So, in the case of the books we're creating, we decided on a ten page book and folded five pieces of drawing paper to achieve this.

Next we worked on the covers. The cereal boxes had to be cut down to size, so we achieved this by cutting out the largest rectangles and setting the rest of the box pieces aside. Then, we folded each rectangle in half and measured how they fit with the paper. Leaving about 1/4 of an inch around the entire edge, we cut the boxes down to size. Then, we used the rulers to created a more burnished edge on the cover.

Covering over the pieces of cardboard came next. We did this "school book cover" style to keep this portion of the project from getting too complex. We glued down everything so none of the paper would bubble up. We used the ruler again to smooth the paper out as we went along and to burnish the edges.

I attached all the pieces of paper together using a stapler. Rather than nesting the pages inside each other "booklet style," I rested them on top of each other (as single-page signatures) and then stapled them. Once that was finished, I nested them inside the covers the kids just created. I glued the front of the first page to the cover and the back of the last page to the cover. To dry these projects, we placed them under a heavy stack of books.

Once the books were completely dry, we were ready to being painting. I chose to teach the kids how to do this with their paint trays - you know, the ones with the dried cakes of paint in them and don't work until a wet brush is applied. I decided to work in this manner so we had more control over how wet the brushes were, how much paint was being applied and how patient they have to be with the process.

We packed backpacks with our handmade books, several paint brushes (in a plastic bag), paint trays (in plastic bags), a small water bottle, small containers, paper towels and pencils. Of course, in my backpack, went a small blanket, snacks, sunblock, drinking water, a first-aid kit, wet naps, bug repellent and my art supplies. To begin our spring break paint project, we decided where to go. I wanted to encourage the kids to paint what they saw into their books, so we came up with several ideas for locations:

1: the backyard

2: their school

3: the library (outside of our library looks historic)

4: the farmer's market

5: the park

Before they started painting, I encouraged them to draw what they saw first so they had some guidelines to use when they started painting. We picked our spot, placed the blanket down and started drawing what was around us. As we drew, we talked about what we liked best about spring break, ate snacks and talked about our drawings. Once they were finished drawing, I put my work aside so I could work one on one with them through the painting process. I wanted to be sure they weren't using too much water or manipulating their pages too much. This wasn't about creating perfect masterpieces, this was about learning what the paint does with a little or a lot of water.

We didn't worry about how dry one page was before working on the next. This was mostly due to the fact that they were working slowly, taking their time and not using too much water to achieve their goals. We also talked about how our books didn't need to be filled during one visit, and that we could go on more spring break painting adventures. I also encouraged them to work in their books from memory when we returned home.