Art for Children

I don’t think that I have established this before, but I am studying Early Childhood Education. It is what it sounds like, a major that focuses and the specific development and learning patterns of infants and young children.

One of the things that I enjoy is that I am often encouraged to use art for a number of projects. While this isn’t always something I enjoy the moment (because who really wants to do a big project for school), in retrospect, I’d rather be drawing than researching.

With the semester drawing to a close, I thought I’d show off some of my work this semester.

1) Hickory, Dickory, Dock: Needed to create a video aimed at literacy. I drew up some little pictures using oil pastels and put them together with some narration.

Check out the video!

2) Golem: Assignment, to read 25 Caldecott winning books, choose one and write and report and produce an original image to reflect the style and content of the book.

I chose the book Golem, for which all of the illustrations are created from cut and torn paper. I was sick during this assignment, so I had to work with what I had at home…7 colors of paper, and 1 size of scissor.

3) Children’s Song Picture Book: This huge project was for music methods in teaching. We were to choose a song from our text, illustrate and bind it into a book. I chose “Bobby Shaftoe.”

For the illustrations I used rough, recycled sketch paper and chalk pastels.

After the illustrations were completed, I scanned the images in at 1600 dpi. I took forever, but printed at full bleed on brochure paper, it was worth the wait.

Because the images were such large files, the text and music could not be imposed over the top. Instead, I waited for the ink to dry and then ran each page through again to receive the text. That means, each page went through the printer 4 times, as the pages were double sided. I was nervous that I would mess up on the last run through, but it came out beautifully.