Painting with kids can be a wonderful and also a frustrating experience.

Kids who love art and painting often times burn out after a period of painting as a result of not having inspiration ” what to  paint

This series on painting with kids is going to build on a series of  exercises in painting that will hopefully lead them to greater creativity and inspiration.

I read through a particular book called Children And Painting and decided to test out these ideas to see if they actually work with young children.
In my experience many books give activities for children that don’t seem based on reality. So I decided to use this  book as painting guide to see if it works in real life.

I added some of my own ideas and took out ones that I saw were not working.

I began by having the children watch me create various lines on a whiteboard.

We did horizontal, vertical, diagonal, zig zag, curvy, dotted, broken and swirly lines.

The children were then given black paint and some standard, thick paintbrushes and told to make as many of those lines as they could on their papers.

Some of the results are above and another one is below.

One child absolutely who was unable to follow the directions at all and proceeded to just totally paint with the black paint all over.

Which just goes to show that  you must give activities to children that are ready for them.

This child obviously was not.

The younger children I worked with around 4-5 years old did not have much interest in going further with these line paintings so I left them and just let them paint with colors.

The older children,  5-7 yr olds were much more-in tune and interested.

After they had made their line paintings I gave them thin paintbrushes and told them to make a smaller version of  their lines next to the fatter lines they had made.

Below is when this little 6 year old was able to add thin lines the same type as the first ones.

I then told them to connect al of their lines.

Some children did and  some didn’t.

We then discussed lines and weather and how we can tell different types of weather by the lines.

In the book, Cathy Weissman Topal seems to feel that children can depict many types of weather through line. I found the types they could do very limited. But they did do some.

After folding the paper in 8 and telling them to make weather painting using the lines we had talked about, most of them could do only a few.

The other weather conditions  the book talks about to try were beyond them. (icicles, fog etc)

This image was the best of the lot and I learned that it is an exercise that needs to be done with older children.

Could be that in the book  that Cathy Topal shows the children many of the weather patterns before allowing them to do it, but I wanted to see what they really could come up with themselves.

So this was the first lesson. We’ll continue on probably with lines in texture.

We’ll see how that works out.