If I could afford to have every child paint every week on canvas instead of on paper, I would do so. Hey wait a minute! I did do exactly that – except I only had to buy one canvas!
I wanted to do a series on colors. You know, a series where I introduce a new color each week and we do something with the color. It’s not that we don’t talk about color all the time but I wanted to really dive into each color and do some color mixing and painting each week and I wanted to do all of our painting on canvas…
I purchased a large canvas and it was not cheap. But I figured we would be exploring six colors over six weeks so that would be less than $10 per week spent on this process that would be explored by the whole group. I could have definitely ordered the same size canvas a little cheaper but I was in a hurry – you know how last minute ideas go – and bought mine from our local Hobby Lobby…
We started with shades of purple our first week. I had already mixed up some of the colors to give the children the idea of color mixing to create shades of purple…
The children spent a long time painting the entire canvas with all the shades of our color purple…
Some of the children stayed longer than others but the board was left up for the children to come and go as they wished throughout the morning…
I spent a little more time during the second week showing the children how to mix the paint on their own to change up the colors…
I set out red and white paint for the children to mix up shades of red (pink)…
By week three, the children had this process down. No need for explanations or instructions or really to say much of anything at all. All I had to do was have the materials out a ready to go. This week the children added shades of orange…
You might be wondering if the children expressed any concern about painting over the top of their prior painting each week. I can tell you that not one child even questioned it. The process of color-mixing was their focus and I loved seeing what the children would do each week…
Sometimes there would be a group of children painting while other times, I would look over and find just one child exploring the process…
Our next week, the children added both blue and yellow to follow up our reading of “Little Blue and Little Yellow” by Leo Lionni…
The more blue and yellow the children added, the more we begin to see the color green begin to emerge…
We have one more week to go and then we will wrap up our color series on canvas. I am still deciding if we will do any other type of painting right on top of our color series or leave it as is for our annual end of the school year art gallery. But I can tell you that this process has given us some beautiful color to explore over the past six weeks and I’ve enjoyed watching my students spend time creating on canvas.
Even my granddaughter joined in!
Available on Amazon
Links to Grow On
Melted Crayon Art in Preschool by Teach Preschool
Canvas Art Ideas for Kids by Fun-A-Day