Book Review: Art Lab For Kids

Art Lab For Kids (affiliate link)

Today I'm reviewing Art Lab For Kids by Susan Schwake. And we took one of the projects for a road test!

Art Lab For Kids is a practical art book with projects grouped by medium. The sections are painting, printmaking, paper, and mixed media.

I liked the important notes at the beginning, such as how to ask a question about a child's piece of artwork. Using thoughtful language such as "tell me about your painting", rather than asking "what is that?" is more respectful. And suggesting promoting fearlessness when it comes to creating art; something I'm still working on! But kids are better at this concept.

I like that the book includes gelatine plate printing, which is a really effective and fun project for kids. (I will have to do it here on the blog one day.)

Art Lab For Kids promotes play and exploring, and shows artists' examples along the way.

As an artist myself, I found myself wanting to explore the fun and interesting methods alongside my kids. The materials used throughout are easily accessible and if you're already a bit arty you will probably have most things at home already.

We chose one of the projects in the book to do, which was watercolour shapes. Here are our results:

Other projects that look interesting within the book that I'd like to try out is plastic printing (where you use plastic on top of painting to gain effects), charcoal drawing combined with acrylic paints, and vellum drawing, which is creating an artwork incorporating some semi- transparent paper.

Then again, art projects are what I could do all day :)

Jules :)

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