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The next time that you're in your local natural history museum, don't just look at the large animals in the dioramas - really look for those hidden small animals, too: a brown-headed cowbird near a bison, a Botta's pocket gopher peeking from a burrow, or a Blue Echo Butterfly on a flower. These smaller details in scenes get as much attention from museum staff as the central figures.

Above, the American Museum of Natural History's Conservation Fellow Bethany Palumbo describes how she studied museum specimens of the Blue Echo to recreate it using a mix of photocopying, hand painting, and sculpting with layers of glue.

New York's AMNH made a series of excellent videos about their dioramas from their 2012 restoration efforts:

Every detail was studied for accuracy, down to the cougar's whisker texture:

Even the shadows, background paintings, and native grasses demand proper attention to detail. After new, energy-efficient lights were installed, museum artist Stephen C. Quinn even altered the slight color variations of the crushed marble dust "snow" to better represent the moon shadows in the Wolf Diorama:

Related watching: Ancient Ancestors Come to Life, How to Make a Large Crocodile Sculpture, Anatomy of Preservation, and Paleontology 101.

h/t Sagan Sense.

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Building a True-to-Life Butterfly for a Habitat Diorama | The Kid Should See This

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The next time that you're in your local natural history museum, don't just look at the large animals in the dioramas - really look for those hidden small animals, too: a brown-headed cowbird near a bison, a Botta's pocket gopher peeking from a burrow, or a Blue Echo Butterfly on a flower.

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Check out slide 6 to see some of the elementary AB art educators sharing their work.

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Painting For Kids: Fun Yarn Art Painting!

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Check out the work of Richard Shilling and get inspired. Head outside and make your own environmental art. Bonus: Photograph it and share the photo!

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Check out Chrome Music Lab's Kandinsky lab. It's inspired by Wassily Kandinsky, an artist who compared painting to making music.

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Music is for everyone. Play with simple experiments that let anyone, of any age, explore how music works.

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Canadian artist Keri Smith has put together daily explorations. May 12 is Boredom Drawings!

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Boredom Drawings — Exploration of the Day

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These are very repetitive drawings that are slightly time consuming but require no thought.  I find them quite helpful when you don’t know what to do.   Option 1.  Fill an entire page with small lines or slashes.  In one area make the lines become really condense

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Check out this resource put together by AB art educators to support making portraits. Includes resources for drawing and inspiration for other materials.

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Bren has painted murals at Blanchard, Conant, Douglas, and Gates!

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Learn how to draw my mash-up drawings step-by-step. I will post a new video every day!

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Play the Exquisite Corpse game (a collaborative drawing game of chance, imagination, and laughter)!

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Reuse dried out markers to make your own liquid watercolors.

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Learn how to make LIQUID WATERCOLOUR PAINT WITH your dried up markers. It's fun and easy and can save you a fortune if you have kids who love to paint.
We love making our own paint here in my daycare. It's a great way to save money, and making the paint is always a fun activity in itself. I'm thrilled to share this homemade liquid watercolour recipe with you today. All you need are old, dried out markers to make it.

Liquid watercolours are amazing. We use them a lot here in my home daycare. They're vibrant, versatile, beautiful, and fun to use.

Liquid watercolours are also expensive to buy - especially when you use them frequently in a daycare or classroom for art projects and colourful science activities.

Good news... I've discovered a way to make your own homemade liquid watercolours which are perfect for preschool arts and crafts.

Lots of ink left in them!

You know those markers that the kids have left the tops off of, or that they've used so often there's no ink left in them, or the ones that have just dried up over time?

Surprise... There's actually a lot of ink left in them.

Even the most worn-out, dried up, marker has a ton of ink left in it. And you can easily extract that ink and turn it into colourful paint for your kids.

Easy but it takes time

The process is easy. It does take a bit of time though, so patience is required, but hey, those markers were just going in the trash anyway, right? Waiting a few days while your markers turn into paint isn't really a biggie.

Let me show you how to do it!
In these above pictures, the outlining was done in crayon. All other colour is the liquid watercolors.
Note: Because I like the intensity of store-bought Liquid Watercolor Paint (affiliate link, I put some extra effort into this process. You don't have to put quite as much effort in, but I feel that it really paid off, and it's why our paints are so vibrant. More on that in a minute.

Supplies:

dried out markers

water

glass jars with lids (large baby food jars or small mason jars are great)

and if you're putting in the extra effort:
How to Make Homemade Liquid Watercolours:

First, your kids need to test all of the markers to see which ones are getting low on ink. We use this opportunity to do this fun little art activity.

Then we set aside the good ones and sorted the dry markers into groups of similar colours. We ended up with 6 piles:

1. red/pink/burgundy

2. orange/yellow/peach

3. green/teal

4. blue/turqoise

5. purple/lavendar

6. brown/black/grey

I set out six glass jars, and the four year old poured a bit of water into each jar.

Next, the hooligans placed the markers, tips down, into the water.

Immediately, colour started to leach out into the water.

We shook and stirred our jars a bit to observe the changes in the water, and then I set the jars on a window sill, and we left them for a full week.

What if some of the water evaporates?

It will happen. Don't sweat it! Some water will evaporate, but your pigment won't.

Your colours will simply become more concentrated, and that's a good thing.

Our water became so dark as the days passed. Turns out there was quite a lot of ink left in those markers after all!

At this point, if you want, you can call it a day, and use your paint as is. This is where the extra effort comes in if you want to get eve more ink out of the markers.

To make our watercolours even more intense:

This next bit can get a little messy, so place everything in the sink, and work from there, or, if you're working on a countertop or table, place everything on an old towel.

With a pair of pliers, I pulled the ends off the markers and removed the coloured inserts. Some of the inserts slipped out easily when I tipped the marker upside down, but others weren't so co-operative, so I used the pliers to crack the plastic casing, and tug the insert out.

Then I snipped up the sponge inserts, and put them in a bowl with a bit of water.

With a fork, I squished the insert pieces until I had extracted all the colour I could, and I poured it into the matching jar.
This was the result of my efforts:
The liquid paint colours are so intense that I have to hold some of them up to the light to tell them apart.

How to use your liquid watercolor paints:

You can use your paints full-strength or you can pour a small amount into an ice cube tray dilute with a few drops of water.

The ones you see below have been diluted.

Preserving your leftover paint:

If, at the end of their painting session, you kids have paint left in the tray DON'T throw it out! Leave the tray out in the open, and let the liquid evaporate. The pigment will dry in the bottom of the tray. When you're ready to paint again, simply add a few drops of water, and stir to re-constitute your paint!

Storing your homemade liquid watercolour paints:

Store your homemade liquid watercolours in air tight containers. I store ours in baby food jars with the lids screwed on securely.

And there you have it. Gorgeous, homemade liquid watercolours for all of your creative art!

And they didn't cost you a dime.

Check out some of the projects we've done with liquid watercolour paints here, here, here and here.

Boredom Busters for Kids!

Print off our checklist of 100 Fun Things for Kids to Do at Home. Stick it on your fridge, and they'll never be bored again!

More Homemade Paint Recipes:
Follow the Hooligans on Facebook

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Vibrant Homemade Liquid Watercolours From Dried Out Markers

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Learn how to make LIQUID WATERCOLOUR PAINT WITH your dried up markers. It's fun and easy and can save you a fortune if you have kids who love to paint. We love making our own paint here in my daycare. It's a great way to save money, and making the paint is always a fun activity in itself.

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Ask a family member for help because this does require using a stove.

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3 ingredient Modeling clay adapted by That Art Teacher.

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Christian Robinson - Picture Book Illustrator

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Christian Robinson - Picture Book Illustrator

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Check out the books he's illustrated on his website.

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An illustrator explains the art of making pictures speak to children

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Life Size Animal Sculptures - Stephen Kesler

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Life Size Animal Sculptures - Stephen Kesler

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A Whale of a Task: Sculpting Model Giants by Hand

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Our planet is drowning in waste, especially that of consumer plastic, washing up on every shore and taking over our nature. The only reason this isn't visible everywhere, are the people working hard everyday to collect and sort our trash. In Mexico City these heroes are known as pepenadores.

Thomas Dambo made The Future Forest, not only to create awareness of this huge issue, but as a tribute to these everyday heroes, not nearly getting the recognition and respect, we all owe them.

Together with the pepenadores, their children, more than 700 students, an orphanage, an elderly home, and more than 100 volunteers, in two months Thomas and his team turned 3 tons of plastic waste into a colorful 500m2 forest with thousands of trees, plants, flowers and animals.

The Future Forest was built in Mexico's Jardín Botánico de Chapultepec as a part of the 2018 Festival FYJA. Filmmaker Alexander Kaiser Lauritzen captured the Danish artist's collaborative project in the video above. You can also see more photos on Dambo's instagram:

Related projects around the world include Skyscraper, a giant found-plastic whale breaches in a Bruges canal, colorful animal sculptures made from upcycled flip-flops in Kenya, Dina Amin's Tinker Friday Stop Motion Project in Egypt, and Argentina's casa ecológica de botellas.

And previously from Dambo: Six Forgotten Giants, Copenhagen's hidden scrap wood sculptures.

This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.

Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today.

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The Future Forest: 3 tons of plastic waste transform a botanical garden in Mexico | The Kid Should See This

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Our planet is drowning in waste, especially that of consumer plastic, washing up on every shore and taking over our nature. The only reason this isn't visible everywhere, are the people working hard everyday to collect and sort our trash. In Mexico City these heroes are known as pepenadores .

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How does Eric Carle create his collage illustrations? What does an artist's studio look like?

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Eric Carle - The Very Hungry Caterpillar - children's book - Waterstone's

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Conant, Gates, and McT students - if you forget how to upload to Artsonia check out this video. Ask your teacher for your Access Code if you don't have it!

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Uploading to Artsonia - Smartphone, Tablet, or Computer

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Look around your house for objects that can be turned into a robot. Lay it out on the floor - No gluing required for this temporary sculpture. Take a photo when you’re done. Thank you to art educator Analiza Vella for the inspiration.

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Watch a live cam of your favorite animal at the San Diego Zoo OR meet the animals at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Take time to observe the animal. Look closely at its details and habitat. Be inspired by what you see and create a drawing, painting or collage.

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MarcPaperScissor: Cut Paper Collage Artist

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MarcPaperScissor: Cut Paper Collage Artist

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Check out how Marc Hoffenberg, known as MarcPaperScissor uses scissors, glue, paper, and sharpies to make his art. Make your own art - THINK - How can you cut, tear, bend, glue and overlap paper to make a collage? Will it be a picture of something or an abstract design?

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MarcPaperScissor: Cut Paper Collage Artist

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Learn about Indonesian shadow puppetry performances called Wayang Kulit and explore making your own shadow puppets.

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Transform Everyday Materials into Something New!

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Transform Everyday Materials into Something New!

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Inspired by Tiny Art Show create a tiny gallery of people, places, and things you are grateful for. Draw your own frames if you can't print out this PDF! Thank you to art educator Cassie Stephens for the inspiration.

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Go on a sculpture scavenger hunt. How many different materials can you gather from around the house to create a sculpture?

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Check out this video created by AB art educator Heidi Kupferman for some inspiration using materials you can find outside.

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Slow Art Day - Institute of Contemporary Art Boston

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Slow Art Day - Institute of Contemporary Art Boston

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Celebrate Slow Art Day and pick a work of art in your home, from a book, or online to spend some time with. Follow the directions on the PDF linked below. Ask your family for help finding a work of art online.
www.icaboston.org/collection
artsandculture.google.com

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Use some clay, aluminum foil, and paint to make an intaglio print. Don't forget to practice if you don't get it quite right the first time!

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Grab your crayons and paper and look for interesting textures around your house. Make texture rubbings to complete your scavenger hunt. Use these rubbings in a collage or as the base for a drawing!

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This week, we invite the At Home Art Studio community to join us on texture and shape scavenger hunts within our homes! We had lots of fun looking for shapes and textures, and encountered surprises along the way. By recording what we found with paper and available drawing tools such as pens, pencils, or crayons, we started noticing interesting patterns. These textures can also lead to lots of other projects, from doodle games to a collage paper collection. Below are the results of our team's shape and texture scavenger hunts.
Texture Scavenger Hunt:
When facilitating programs at The Carle, we often talk about texture and how everything has a different feel to it like soft yarn, bumpy corrugated cardboard, and scratchy twine. There are so many things around your home that have unique textures! With adult supervision, take a trip around your home and see how many different types you can find. You might find that once you start to look, everyday objects provide all sorts of textured options!

Once you find these textures, try transferring them to paper using a technique called texture rubbings.

Using the side of a crayon and notebook paper, Sara placed the paper over an object, then ran the crayon across the paper to reveal a texture underneath. (Supervising adults can help by holding down the objects and/or paper while the artist rubs the crayon across the paper.)

Ryan didn't have to go far to find some interesting textures in his home. This first image came from the living room wall! The second came from a cooling tray he found in the kitchen.

Siobhán has a lot of plants in her house so she used the pots for several of the patterns. She also used the bricks on her fireplace and a candle lid. She didn't have crayons so she used colored pencils which meant that she had to be more careful to get an even texture and not poke through the paper.

Megan look around for interesting textures, and decided to experiment with layering multiple colors with the same texture. She made textures (seen left to right above) from a wooden table top pattern, a textured coaster rotated in different directions, and the same wall using different colors.

Janet used a variety of wicker baskets to create textures.

Sara decided to make densely textured papers by layering colors within the same color family (warm, cool, and neutral) together. She plans on using these papers for future collage projects and perhaps to wrap a book cover.
Shape Scavenger Hunt:
Another At Home Art Studio scavenger hunt you can try is to look for shapes around your home. In the Art Studio, we like to explore how different shapes can be combined to create patterns or become a collage creature. Just like in the texture scavenger hunt, you can take a trip around your home and find shapes to trace or freehand draw onto your paper.

Meg made a paper where she traced and colored in as many different shapes as she could find in one room. Some of the objects were easier to trace than others, the rubber band was most difficult!

Meg then decided to look for square and rectangular objects. She traced them over and over again with ball point pens and colored pencils onto part of a paper bag and a piece of notebook paper. She found the patterns and additional shapes created by this process really interesting.

Megan also experimented with tracing different shapes of objects, and decided to use one color for each shape. Blue for circles, purple for triangles, and magenta for rectangles.

Meg repeated the process with circles, this time trying it on a page from a magazine. The circles she found and traced included jar lids, coins, and rolls of tape.
More Ideas to Explore:
The shapes and textures we found, and the colorful papers we created, continue to inspire us. Here are some ideas we were interested to try:

Use a shape or texture you find as the start of a drawing. What can you turn that shape into? What could that texture become? If you have others in your household with you, turn this a collaborative doodle game! Draw or trace a shape/texture onto a paper, then challenge someone to transform it into something else using drawing tools.

Turn the papers into a card to send to someone. After Siobhán collected a few textures, she took the ones she liked and folded them into notes for friends.

Add these textured, patterned papers to your At Home Art Studio collage collection to use in future projects! We have been very inspired to add our papers to our growing collection of collage papers, just as we do in the museum Art Studio.

We look forward to seeing the results of your texture and shape scavenger hunts! Share your images and videos by tagging @carlemuseum on social media, and stay tuned for next week's art exploration!

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This week, we invite the At Home Art Studio community to join us on texture and shape scavenger hunts within our homes! We had lots of fun looking for shapes and textures, and encountered surprises along the way. By recording what we found with paper and available drawing tools such as pens, pencils, or crayons, we started noticing interesting patterns.

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Collect some sticks, leaves, and other natural materials and build a fairy house. Check out this video from AB art educator Heidi Kupferman for inspiration!

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Try making a piece of art using materials in your kitchen, like beans or rice! All you need is a piece of paper, glue, and permission to raid the kitchen cabinets.

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Looking for activities for children in grades 3-6? Check out the Gr 3-6 Art Choices Padlet.

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Follow along with different tutorials for a variety of origami patterns. If you don't have a square paper don't forget you can fold a rectangle paper into a square.

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origami "origami easy" "origami flower" "origami video" "easy origami"

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Easy Origami for Beginners Easy Origami for Kids #origamieasy

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Check out this list of ideas when you are stuck and not sure where to start.

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Practice your drawing daily.

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Gather an old sock, some fabric, scissors, buttons, and glue to make a sock puppet. Check out this video from AB art educator Heidi Kupferman for inspiration!

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How to Finger Knit

While we're all housebound, there's no time like the present to get those kiddos interested in yarn craft. My favorite way to do that is with finger knitting, so I've put together a quick video tutorial and a few free projects to get your little started. Grab some yarn, bribe your kids (kiddingnotkidding), and let the love of knitting begin!

How to Finger Knit: Watch and Learn

Finger Knitting Project Ideas
Finger Knit Scarf Finger Knit Necklace
Snuggly Snakes

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How to FInger Knit | Video Tutorial for Kids to Learn Finger Knitting

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While we're all housebound, there's no time like the present to get those kiddos interested in yarn craft. My favorite way to do that is with finger knitting, so I've put together a quick video tutorial and a few free projects to get your little started.

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Share your in progress or completed pieces with your art teacher

Blanchard - Email

Conant - Upload to Artsonia, Post to FlipGrid, or Email

Gates - Upload to Artsonia or Email

Douglas - Email

McT - Email or Upload to Artsonia.

Merriam - Email

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Scroll down to see more options for each category.

Click on an image to view larger or to navigate to a webpage with more information.

Additional resources are linked in pink under each topic.

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Gather materials around your house to create a color wheel. Snap a picture of your finished piece and share with your art teacher.

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Use a washable marker to ink your finger to make a print. Turn your prints into a fun character. Check out the video below for inspiration.

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Not only do we love this short promo by Animade.tv for Marion Deuchars' book Let's Make Some Great Fingerprint Art, but we like the book, too. In the tradition of Ed Emberley, Deuchars inspires kids (and adults) to invent their own creatures using inky and imaginative fingertips.

Enjoy a few more of their animated commercials:

Find Let's Make some Great Fingerprint Art in your local book store or on Amazon, and if you don't yet have some ink pads, Deuchars' site includes a few treats, including online Fingerprint Art and Tangram activites.

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Marion Deuchars' Let's Make some Great Fingerprint Art

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Not only do we love this short promo by Animade.tv for Marion Deuchars' book Let's Make Some Great Fingerprint Art, but we like the book, too. In the