ART Spark
Setting aside time in your day to do a quick art activity can be restorative and get your creative juices flowing. Here are some quick, easy, and fun projects. Ready, set, CREATE!
Floral Display
Spring is a great time to gather wild flowers on a walk and use them as your (free & wild!) art supplies. Express yourself with flowers: compose letters, words and designs! Discover the beauty of what you've found in nature. Take a photo and share your message with a loved one.
Blind Contour Drawing
Without looking down on your paper, draw an object with one continuous line. This can be you hand, plant, pet or piece of fruit. Look in a mirror and draw a self-portrait.
Mandala
Using a collection of pens or utensils, create a mandala by organizing elements so they are radially symmetric and the elements radiate outwards from the center.
Foil Sculpture
Using aluminum foil, create a sculpture that expresses a word such as fire, water, air, flight or an emotion such as hope.
Zentangle
Draw four dots to define a 3-1/2"x3-1/2" square. Using the zentangle method, connect the dots and then draw a "string" to divide the tile into sections. It can be a zigzag, loop, X, a swirl or other zentangle shape. Color in the shapes you've created. Make several or have friends join you to make a graphic quilt.
A-Z Doodle
Write a letter, your name, word, or heart in the center of the page. Either draw one continuous line around the perimeter or a series of radiating lines. If you like this, you'll love Zentangle!
Collage
Gather scraps of paper, fabric or other materials: newspapers, magazines, twine, and netting. Anything goes! Arrange the items into a composition. Make a shape or free form. Mix it up tear or cut. Play with scale and color.
Many artists use collaging as starting points to explore and generate ideas.
Choreography
Choreography is designed sequences of physical movements. With intention, move in space to spell out your name or a word that is meaningful to you.
Use your whole body to take up space. Expand from small to big, extend from low to high, condense from wide to narrow, shift from left to right. Enjoy the flow!
Impromptu Sculpture
You don't need special building blocks to create a sculpture. Grab a few items from around you and stack them up. See how tall or wide you can get them.
For added fun, challenge a friend to a timed sculpture building contest such as our fork lift game.
Ideaphoria
Write a list of 9 (or more!) outragious reasons you can't be creative today. Come up with the most outlandish excuses imaginable! The crazier the better! Make "my dog ate my homework" a weak excuse compared to yours!
Hexaflexagon
These 3D rotating sculptures seem like magic but they're actually very easy to make. You too can make a hexaflexagon and add your own design touches. Just saying "hexaflagon" is fun! All you need: paper, pencil, ruler, scissors and glue.
Scribble
Draw loose squiggly lines. Like seeing forms in clouds, turn your scribbles into an image. Add eyes to make a creature. Or perhaps you see a flower and a add a vase, dinosaur and add teeth, or a bird and add a beak? A variation is to crumple up a piece of paper and see images in the random fold lines If you have ink, make a Splat figure.
Mega Match
Scroll through the items in the galleries above. Quickly sketch a drawing of what you imagine would happen if the objects were combined. Consider the slides to be suggestions – for instance, if the image is a rabbit but makes you think of another animal, feel free to swap it out or if the image is one object, such as a pencil, draw as many pencils as you'd like. There's no limit to your imagination!
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Notan
Start with a square piece of paper. Cut out shapes, carefully saving all the cut out pieces. Flip the cutout pieces. Place them so that outside the square, the "positive" shapes mirror the "negative" space left in the square shape. It 's best if the cut paper contrasts with the surface. The edge of the square is the reflecting line of the design. For a quick exercise, you can draw the shapes instead of cutting them out and fill in the solids.
Pencil Power
Pencils are made of a mixture of graphite powder and clay binder. Different combinations of these two elements create pencils with distinct types of leads, each with its own stroke quality. Artists select which pencil type to use depending on the marks and effects they want to achieve.
Dots!
Place one or more dots (or trace a coin to make a circle) on a piece of paper.
Doing a drawing that incorporates the dot. Perhaps an animal, vehicle, place, insect, robot, alien, bug, sport or food. The possibilities are as limitless as your imagination!
