Valentine's Day Art Project Lesson Plans

Valentine's Day lends itself to lots of colorful, heart shaped crafts. Valentine's Day can also be a "lovely" inspiration for teaching basic art concepts and art techniques while creating Valentine's Day art.

While these art lessons produce finished products, students will be learning through the process and can apply these concepts and techniques to many other art projects in the future. The finished Valentine's Day art projects can stand alone, be incorporated into homemade Valentine's Day cards or be used to create beautiful Valentine's Day bulletin boards for February.

Valentine's Day art: Teaching positive and negative space with splatter painting

In art positive space is the space where a medium (such as paint) is applied and negative space is shape or outline created when the medium is applied to the area outside of the shape.

Materials needed:
Solid color paper (3 sheets per project and 1 can be previously used or recyclable paper)
Paints
Brushes
Scissors
Table covering
Tape

Part one: positive space

To begin students will learn how to fold a paper in half, sketch half of heart from the fold and cut out a heart shape, leaving the outer paper intact.

To create a positive space heart with splatter paint, students will place the paper with the heart cut out over their canvas paper. It can be helpful to use tiny pieces of tape to hold the top sheet in place.

Now comes the fun part. Students will dip small brushes into a color of paint that will stand out. For example, red paint can be used over pink paper or pink paint over white paper. Remember that the color of the paper that is cut is unimportant as it is not part of the final product.

Students will gently splat the paint or thump the brush to get a splattered paint effect. It is best to practice the splatter paint technique on the table cover paper to get the "feel" first. Let the paint dry before removing the top paper. This will create a positive space heart with splattered paint.

Part two: negative space

The second part of this art project is creating another splattered paint heart, this time by applying the heart to the canvas paper and splattering paint all around the edges, even covering the paper. Allow the paint to dry before removing the heart. This will create a negative space heart with splattered paint.

Alternative ideas:

Of course splatter painting is just one technique that could be used in the art lesson plans. Students could paint in the entire positive and negative space or create dots or stripes. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination.

Get fancy Valentine's art tips:

-Using crinkled cut or scalloped scissors to cut out the heart can give both the negative space hearts and positive space hearts an interesting outline.

-You can also use more than one color of paint to splatter such as red, purple and white over pink paper.

-While the paint is still drying, students can sprinkle gold or silver glitter to add another medium and some sparkle to the Valentine's Day art project.

Applications for homemade Valentine's Day gifts:

The techniques used in these Valentine's Day art lesson plans don't have to be reserved just for paper. With fabric paints or fabric markers these techniques could be applied to create homemade Valentine's Day gifts such reusable shopping bags, book bags, t-shirts, hats, book covers or aprons.