Art Lab for Kids: Express Yourself: 52 Creative Adventures to Find Your Voice Through Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media, and Sculpt

Description

An important gift we can give children is to nurture their creativity and allow them to express themselves freely. There's no better way to express yourself than through creative art projects, and that is doubly true for children because it gives them an outlet to explore their developing interests and strengths. Art Lab for Kids: Express Yourself! contains 52 brand new original art projects that will draw out each young artist as they discover their style, document their thoughts, and build confidence in their unique perspective. Each lesson asks questions and offers personal choices while encouraging diverse approaches and creative thinking. The Colourful Beasts project, which incorporates discussion of endangered animals with the Blue Riders art movement, asks children to use torn coloured tissue paper and glue to create an expressive representation of a favourite vulnerable animal. In I Built This City, children imagine and build their own cityscape using columns of newspaper text to make buildings, watercolour for the background, and marker to fill in the detail and add residents. Many projects include varying examples and executions of the activity to illustrate and reinforce the open-ended nature of the labs, inspiring children to embrace and share their own voice. Give children the great gift of creative self-exploration with Art Lab for Kids, Express Yourself!

Susan Schwake is an artist, art educator, and curator. Her passion for teaching art has led her to working in diverse settings for over 20 years. She has inspired thousands of people in private and public schools, museums, community organizations, special needs agencies, summer camps, intergenerational facilities, libraries, and her own art school, artstream in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, which she co-owns with her husband, Rainer. Most recently she has taken her classroom online with the a series of e-courses for artists, including a parent-child class based on her best-selling Art Lab for Kids series of books. She is also curator of artstream studios, where she has brought over 100 group shows of contemporary art to her corner of New England.