Painting sunflowers

It seems like a lifetime since my last post. My life appears to be inundated with classes to teach, classes to attend, must read books for these classes, homeschooling and just life in general. We have been to the county and state fair this month as well as a variety of other field trips. Time is passing by faster than I can keep up with.


So now finally I'm taking the time to write again. Sure feels great! So what's going on in our house now?


Like most children my children love to paint and create. Did I mention get messy? Back to my point. Sometimes they paint freely choosing whatever they want while other times I try to cultivate the skill of painting different strokes and I pick something for them to focus on to paint. We used sunflowers as an object, see the results below. They enjoyed this art lesson. Hope you do too!

Observation time

Using the sense of smell

Looking very carefully

How does the water feel?

Getting started

Just for the record I did not sit the flowers out and then tell the children to paint them. There is a process we use before we paint any object. First we talked about the sunflowers, the colors, the parts including the seeds, this is observation, where we mix science and art. We revisited the time when we planted them in our yard last spring. We then take the time to feel and smell the flowers. Some parts are soft and others are course. I let them explore and then when they were ready they painted the sunflowers.

I showed them how to make the seeds with the bristles of the brush, the type of strokes to create the petals and how to paint the stem of the flower with smooth strokes. I'm not an artist, just using some deductive reasoning.... maybe?  Not sure how much they actually picked up but they tried!

When it was all said and done, they were pleased with their pictures and so was I...