Below are some art lessons, drawing guides, art history research and reflection questions, art websites, art games, and more ways for you to have fun and learn with ART!
Complete one of these projects per week and email a photo of your completed projects to brucep1@dearbornschools.org.
Yoga Gesture Drawings
Look at someone who is doing yoga and quickly try to capture their gesture by looking closely at what their body is doing and drawing it! You do not need to add details to these drawings, but if you want to take it a step further you can!
Rainbow Flower Garden Drawing
Draw your own rainbow garden by drawing 7 flowers then colring them in the ROYGBIV rainbow color order! This project was inspired by the book “Planting a Rainbow”. The video below shows the story!
Coin Spinners
Stuffed Animal Drawing
Past and Future Hand Drawing

Pop Out Interior Design Room

Origami House
Overlapping City Buildings With Faces

Cardboard Shape Robot
An optional extra step you can do when you are done gluing your robot is to make a crayon rubbing with it!
Warm or Cool Colored Castle Drawing

Color Scavenger Hunt Collage

Step1: Choose a color
Step 2: Go for a walk and look for things that are your chosen color
Step 3: Take pictures of the color objects you see
Step 4: Upload your photos to your Google Drive, email them to yourself, or download them to the device you are going to be using for your collage
Step 5: In Google Drawings, add your images and collage them together in a way that looks nice to you.
Step 6: Share or send me your finished collage!
Paul Klee Inspired Patterned Fish Drawing
Step 1: Draw your fish
Step 2: Trace your pencil lines with marker (if you have markers)
Step 3: Draw a pattern in the fish’s body
Step 4: Color in your pattern
Step 5: Write a word, letters, or numbers repeated in the background
Step 6: Color or paint over the letters in the background

Stop Motion Animation
Second grade artists at Geer Park were in the middle of creating a stop motion animation project in art class. Now you can create one at home! Follow the videos below to see how to create a video with Stop Motion Animator, a Google Chrome extension. You do not need a chromebook to do this, just make sure you are using Google Chrome as your browser.
Launching Stop Motion Animator
Creating in Stop Motion Animator:
Adding sound to your animation:
Saving and Sending your animation
Pattern Landscape

Draw a landscape and fill each part with different patterns! A landscape is an artwork that shows outside. What are things you see outside in Michigan? What are things you might see outside in a different state or country that you don’t see here? Your landscape drawing can show anywhere!
A pattern is anything that repeats. Your pattern could have 2 or more repeating parts and you could use shapes, lines, and colors to show your patterns!

Still Life Drawing
A still life drawing is when an artist looks at objects that don’t move and draws them as they see them! First graders at Henry Ford have just started practicing still life drawings with pears (first graders at Geer Park were about to start this before our break from school).
Below are some of Paul Cezanne’s still lives! Cezanne is an artist who was from France and lived over 100 years ago. He made many different types of paintings, including still lifes!
Create your own still life drawing by choosing a few objects to draw. Place your objects somewhere where you can easily see them. When you are drawing look for shapes and lines that you see. After you have drawn your still life, look for dark and light spots. Are there shadows under or on your objects? Color these shadows in your drawing!
Here are some of the Henry Ford first graders’ pear still lives that they started:
Paper Sculpture
All of my kindergarten artists have made a paper sculpture like this before, but can you try to make a new paper sculpture that has more details and new folds??
You can use construction paper like we did in class, or you can try to see if different materials will work to like magazine papers, recycled cereal boxes, duct tape folded in half, etc!
DIY Liquid Watercolor Paints
If you do not have paints at home, but you have liquid food coloring, have an adult or an older sibling help you to make your own liquid watercolor paints with this tutorial below!
If you try this at home, make sure you send me a photo of your paintings! I would love to see them!
Symmetrical Masks
First grade artists that have Ms. Bruce recently made symmetrical masks and did some printmaking with them. For this project, you can cut papers and glue the pieces together to create a symmetrical mask. If you don’t have papers, scissors, and glue, you could also draw and color a symmetrical mask.

If something is symmetrical, it means you can draw an imaginary line down the middle called the line of symmetry, and both sides will mirror each other, or match. So if you add a purple triangle eye to the left side of your mask, you will need to add a triangle purple eye to the right side of your mask too!
Above are some examples from last year’s first grade symmetrical masks made out of paper.
Andy Goldsworthy Nature Designs
With the weather warming up, it’s a great time to get outside and create artwork with the nature that is surrounding you!
The images above are form an artist named Andy Goldsworthy. He uses nature to create beautiful designs and then photographs them. Many of his designs show symmetry and patterns.
Go outside and create your own artwork with nature! You can use sticks, leaves, flowers, weeds, dirt, wood chips, stones, or whatever else you can find!
Salt Dough Recipe
We love to use clay in the art room at school! If you do not have clay at home, here is a recipe you can use to make a dough that can be molded and sculpted similar to clay! You will need:
2 cups of flour
1 cup of salt
1 cup of water
Mix these together in a large bowl, adding more water or more flour to get the desired consistency. Then you can create a sculpture with the dough! The dough will not be waterproof when it dries, but you can paint it or press other objects into the dough to decorate it! Below are a few pictures of salt dough ideas to create:
With an adult’s help, you can bake the salt dough after you have molded it, but before you add paint or other objects. This link has directions on baking the salt dough to harden it.
Texture Crayon Rubbings
Take paper and crayons with you and go outside for a walk or even in your own backyard and look for textures! Texture is the way something feels. When you see something with an interesting texture, place your paper over it and rub your crayon over the paper. Make sure to hold the paper still, and you should see the texture appear on your paper!


Once you have made several different texture rubbings, you can make a new artwork with these papers! Some ideas are to collage the papers together for an interesting design, cut out shapes from each page and glue them to a new paper, draw something on top of the texture papers, or glue them around recycled objects to create a recycled, textured, monster sculpture!
Found Art Plate Portraits
Art can be made with everything! Use a plate for the base of your portrait and then look around your house for objects you can use for eyes, nose, mouth, and hair. Place the objects on the plate to show a face and then take a picture!

Found Object Color Wheel
Find different colored objects around your house to make a color wheel! After you have gathered several objects, begin to lay them in a circle in the color wheel order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple).
Polygon Cardboard Sculptures

For this project, you will need:
-cardboard (this can be from a recycled food box, from a package, etc.)
-Scissors
-optional:paint and paint brush OR crayons or markers

Step 1: With help from an adult or older sibling, cut the cardboard into different polygon shapes.
Step 2: Cut 1/2″ to 1″ slits on at least two sides of each shape. If you cut diagonal lines like the top of a letter “A” a small triangle slit will come out from your cardboard which is much easier to cut.

Step 3: Optional: paint each piece or color each piece of cardboard.

Spet 4: Create your sculpture by sliding the cardboard pieces into the slits on other cardboard pieces.
Picasso Drawing
Learn about the artist Picasso in the video below!
Then follow the next video to make your own Picasso-inspired dog drawing!
Michigan Awesome Coloring Pages
The company Michigan Awesome has made a few coloring pages about the state of Michigan that you can download, print and color at home! If you wish to, you can also share your finished coloring pages with the company’s instagram @michiganawesome
This is a link to download the coloring pages.
Painting With Coffee
If you do not have paint at home, or if you would like to try a new art challenge, try painting with coffee!
You can mix different amounts of coffee with water to create lighter and darker browns to use. Below are some images I found online of paintings that were made with coffee!
This sentence is a link to more detailed directions for painting with coffee.
This video below shows how you can also paint with dirt or mud!
Cardboard Animal Sculptures
Use recycled cardboard to create a standing animal sculpture! Used cereal, pizza, cracker, or delivery boxes can be drawn on and cut for this project. Make sure to get an adult’s permission before cutting a box that you find. If the cardboard you are using is very thick, you may need to ask an adult for help to cut safely.

Sketch the animal you want to create first. Then think about what parts of your animal will need to touch the ground in order for your sculpture to stand.
HERE is a link to templates for some animals. Use the templates, or create your own! I will make a paper template first when I try this. Then, when I see that the aper template works, I will try it with cardboard!
You can add color to your animal with crayons, paint, colored pencils, gluing paper to the cardboard, or you can leave the cardboard showing an not add color!
Pick 2 Reflective questions to answer when you are finished:
1. Why did you choose this animal to make?
2. Where in the world does your animal live?
3. What are the foods that your animal eats?
4. What was the most difficult part of making your sculpture?
5. If you were to do this again, what would you do differently? Why?
Look at how Mrs. Russell created a colorful, cardboard cow!