My youngest is the normally the more reluctant artist but then every so often we discover an art activity that he loves and he just can’t get enough. For any art activity to be a hit with him it has to be based on a topic that he loves – so dinosaurs and animals are normally my “go to” art subject for him.
And he love spiders. He actually gets angry with me if I try to remove a spider from the house, he tells me they are helping by killing the bugs. So when he asked if he could try to paint watercolours over oil pastels (he had heard a friend talking about it last week) I thought a spider picture might be the perfect subject as he could do the web in oil pastels and then paint over the web with his watercolour paints.
We already had the Spider templates from Activity Village printed and cut out (he had wanted to use them to make some stick puppets) so we used those.
The kids traced around the spiders and then added the web around the spiders.
They coloured in the spiders with their oil pastels and traced over the web with the pastels.
Then we painted over everything with our watercolours (when you paint over oil pastels with watercolours they do not mix so the oil pastel outline / picture stays there and the watercolours just become the background).
One of the end results (you can see the oil pastels come “through” the watercolours)
And you know he really enjoyed doing it as he sat down and did another one just before bedtime.
And if the older kids want to join in you can always encourage them to use multiple spiders or multiple colours.
A very easy art idea but I really liked it as my youngest enjoyed making the pictures and the more they enjoy art the more they want to do art. And while he was having fun he was tracing around pictures (using both hands together), practicing his pencil control, when he traced over the pencil outlines with his oil pastels and he painted. So for me a fun art activity that had him doing three activities – tracing, colouring using oil pastels and painting.
ofamily learning together 
Its always nice when the reluctant artist finds something he enjoys creating! My son is the same way.
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