Alesia’s Art Activities
Alesia Lacina has a long history of arts education in Grinnell. Here are some of her favorite art activities for you!
Collage of Yourself
Materials
Small front facing headshot of child printed out
Magazines (National Geographic works really well)
Scissors
Glue
Instructions
- For this project, the kids cut out their heads from the photo. Then they searched through the magazines to find legs, arms, tails, whatever body parts they wanted to make. Have kids cut out their heads from the photo.
Have kids search through magazines to find and cut out:
A full page to use as a backdrop
Body parts
Other things they wanted to add to the background
Put the collage together and glue.
Tips
Encourage the kids to be creative with this project - some of the more interesting finished projects didn’t use animal or human parts for bodies but parts of plants or machinery.
Cutouts
2-color cutouts
Materials
- Multi-colored paper
- scissors
- double stick tape and/or glue sticks
Instructions
Fold one piece of paper in half any way, corner-to-corner or end-to-end.
Still folded, fold in half again.
Using scissors, cut out shapes as you would to make snowflake, being mindful to leave the general size of the paper the same.
Tape or glue the cut out to another piece of paper.
To make a cutout with more than two colors, repeat steps 1-3 and glue each additional layer onto the first paper.
Tips
Encourage as much cutting as possible! The more cut out, the more interesting the final product will be.
This is a great way to teach kids about complimentary colors.
3-color cutout
3-color cutout