Paint Exploration Project

Lesson: Art and design

Class: Garden Room Year: 2019 - 2020

This term we noticed that lots of the children have been enjoying spending time using the paint at nursery. This has inspired a project around paint exploration with these children to provide new and interesting opportunities and ways for them to use paint.

First we looked at different things we could use to paint with, we looked at the resources we have on our shelf at nursery. We had paint brushes, rollers and sponge dabbers. We looked at the different marks each of these item made using the paint, they were all very different. The children then explored these themselves.

Then we looked at using printing as a new skill, this was modelled to the children and the children helped to collate items we could print with. The children explored this technique and created fabulous pieces of artwork.

Next we looked at using something other than ‘paint’ to paint with. We has our forest school session and we used mud and water to create our ‘paint’ before finding different natural items to paint with. The children found leaves and sticks, Emma found some feathers too. The children explored using these to create their mud paintings.

Some of the children loved using big movements and using up all of the paper and beyond. This told us that the children needed something bigger scale. These children were given the opportunity to create some large scale art outside using paint splatting and large printing wheels. The children also used their hands and feet as part of the exploration.

Some of the children enjoy using the paint brushed to paint and are into smaller scale painting. We asked the children what they would like to paint a picture of and created a mind map of our ideas.  The general consensus was that they wanted to paint pictures of themselves. We decided to explore self-portraits.

These children painted self-portraits. We talked about what we would need to include by looking at each other’s faces. The children used paint brushes and colours of their choice to create their own self-portraits.

After our self-portrait painting we had a practise of drawing ourselves by looking at where the different parts of our face are. We used a mirror and we looked at our friends to work out where our eyes, nose, mouth and ears go.

All of the children had a really good go of drawing themselves.

The children have loved the paint exploration and we have noticed the children using their new found skills within their paintings.