Kids Creating Art At Home

By Spramani Elaun

In this blog I’m going to highlight my best tips for kids creating art projects at home.

As a homeschool mom, I’ve spent many years working through art projects and selecting art supplies for my own kids and art students.

It all started many years ago in my kitchen, I started teaching my own children visual arts, then it blossomed into a home art school business – Nature of Art For Kids®!

If you want to learn more, I write detailed information in my art education books listed at the bottom of this blog.

Some of these answers come right out my published books.

Where should you teach art lessons? 

The kitchen table can work great for art projects.

If you don’t want paint all over the place, then you can set-up an art space in the basement, or outside patio.

Over the years our art making space moved around the house.

When I wanted to demonstrate a special technique we would gather around the kitchen table.

I really liked the kitchen because it was the easiest place to clean-up and wipe spills away.

If art project were supper messy, we went outside to the patio or somewhere in the back yard.

As my kids grew their projects got more private, and they moved art making into their own room space or favorite comfy spot in our home.

For the most part, my advise is you do art where you feel most comfortable, and where the kids what to be.

My kids always wanted to close to me and where all the action was, in the kitchen!

Can you teach your own kids?

Yes, you can teach your own kids art!

Children can learn basic art lessons just as easily as learning to cook.

Yes, you can get your own kids doing fun art projects like the art expertise in art and craft books.

You really don’t need to know how to paint or draw realistic pictures yourself to guide your child.

Here’s Why

I’ve spoken and lectured to thousands of parents and K-12 teachers on this topic, you and your child can learn a primary art education together easily.

One of the most important things you should know is, kids ages 6 thru 12 years old should not be learning difficult drawing or painting skills quite yet. Not until lots of process art making projects have taken place. What I mean by this is lots of natural exploratory art play making that’s simple.

You and your child can learn the basics together, then progress into more complex projects.

Once a pre-teen or teenager has interest in learning to drawing or paint, and wants professional help, you can guide them to art classes locally, or find self guided video classes online to learn a particular skill set.

What art should you teach?

I’ve spent years perfecting this and trying to figure out what art topics are important children should learn. This list is based on my book recommendations on what a balanced visual art education should cover. I refer to them as the 5 domains of visual art education:

Drawing

Painting

Color Theory

Modeling & Sculpture

Crafting & Building

In my books I dive a bit deeper on how to develop curriculum for different ages and what methods to use.

You can find this information in Nurturing Children in The Visual Arts Naturally , and Introducing Visual Arts to The Montessori Classroom. I also have a painting book Kids Painting, Kids Color Theory and a book on clay modeling – Clay Play.

You can buy these in paperback or eBook. All very helpful for the parent teaching home art projects.

What art supplies work well at home?

Here’s my list from one of my popular blog post on art supplies. Follow the link here to get details why:

Ultimate Guide | 10 Art Supplies Kids Love!

Square block Crayons – Colour Blocks

Thick Natural Wood Color Pencils

Soft Pastels

Oil Pastels

Watercolor Soluble Pencils

Watercolor Soluble Crayons

Dry watercolor cake palette – 36 colors

Modeling Non-Harden Clay

Acrylic Paint – Kids Student Grade Only

Liquid Watercolor/Finger Paint

In this post I shared some important tips if you want to teach your own child art in your home.

I’ve focused my business for years on this topic, I do recommend you check out some of my books to get all sorts of my life long tips I’ve mastered teaching my own two kids and art students. I cover every topic on teaching children visual arts.

Being artful at home can be achieved!