Pollock-Inspired Salad Spinner Art

A couple of weeks ago Pumpkin started taking seasonal arts and crafts classes.  Now, she wants to do art all the time. We are running out of tempera paint!
  I felt like doing something abstract with her and thought about Jackson Pollock.  He was a "human spinner" holding buckets of paint in his hands and spinning around on the canvas creating his works of art that way(you can give it a shot on a summer day on your back yard). Yesterday we did some less messy Pollock-inspired art using a salad spinner. It's fast and a lot of fun.
All you need is:

• a salad spinner
• non-toxic, washable tempera paint
• paper circles, cut to fit the bottom of your salad spinner( or paper plates if they fit)

What you do:
Open your spinner and put the paper on the bottom. Splatter/pour/drip any kinds of paint of any color in any pattern or non pattern at all(how cool is that!).  Then, put the top back on and spin it!  Open it up - ta-da!  Your art is ready.  All it needs now is some time to dry.
And do you know the best thing about it?  It never gets old because it comes out in a different way every time!
Here are some things that came out of our salad spinner.  We did a couple of them using "fall" colors. 

 

Here are some Jackson Pollock links you might find interesting:

http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/pollockhome.shtm

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/pollock_jackson.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/468051/Jackson-Pollock
 http://www.manetas.com/pollock/ (Pollock interactive: create your own Pollock with a couple of mouse clicks)  
http://www.jacksonpollock.com/email.shtml  (very interesting about if there is a  structure in his art)

 

I hope all of you will have a lot of fun with it.  Unleash your inner Pollocks!

Testing

Pumpkin has a thing for testing me lately.  Yesterday she wrote down a number of math equations for me.  It was my "homework".  And I want to admit that she doubted my knowledge of basic math when the answer to her 2-20 was -18.
Today I had a different test...

She came up to me and gave me a paper explaining that I needed to choose the correct answer.  Here is the paper(please, don't mind the poor quality, one of these days I'll invest in a good camera).

I had two choices: "I love you" and "I don't love you". LOL.

I chose the "I love you" one and looked at Pumpkin. She had that look that teachers have when their students do well on the test.

She also told me: "Mommy, I need to teach you".  LOL.  I guess, I'm past due for some "upgrading".

stART: Blueberries for Sal

I came across stART a couple of weeks ago and liked the idea of reading and art combination right away.  Our public library has a similar program every Saturday where children have a story hour first and then they do craft related to the story.  My daughter enjoys it very much.  This week I decided to participate in stART carnival created by A Mommy's Adventures. This week she has a fun craft, by the way.
Yesterday we read a classic children's book Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey.

The story has a great plot that children can relate themselves to. Two little ones - little girl Sal and Little Bear - get lost for a little while while picking blueberries which resulted in swapping moms and creating a comical situation enjoyable for young listeners.
We liked this story so much that we decided to make our own Blueberry Hill and the main characters so we could role play it.  I made the characters by drawing them with colored pencils and glueing them to cardboard.   Pumpkin and I made Blueberry Hill together.  Cardboard, colored paper, hole puncher and glue is all you will need.

This is our Blueberry Hill with two moms and two little ones.