Little Tiny Bits Collage

You might have to squint a little, but it's there!

ADDED September 11, 2009

Length: 30 minutes to an hour.

Parental Involvement: Provide old magazines, catalogs, etc. Help with cutting and gluing as necessary.

Kids Should Be Able to: See color and spaces imaginatively and re-purpose them!

Grab some old magazines, scissors, paper and glue. For today's craft, we will be making a collage, but the trick is to use small pieces of paper and glue them together so that they form a larger image.

In testing this out, we decided to make a banana, so the first thing we needed was the color yellow. We searched a few magazines for little bits of yellow, making sure they were small but not too small. We found a street sign, flower, pillow, shirt, chair and table cloth -- all yellow. We noticed that a banana has a brown part on the top, so we looked for some brown and found a lady with brown hair and a brown lamp. After that, we were ready to glue. Together we worked slowly, piecing and gluing our parts until we had a banana. Here is what it looked like.

kids art collage

This craft is a great imagination booster because you are forced to look at things differently. You need to use imagination to form an image. And you also have to deconstruct the image down to its smallest parts and re-form it into its final form. Personally, I thinks it great all around.

Today's activity might be a little abstract, but that's okay, because art speaks to people in different ways. The beauty of being an artist is you only need to make something that you like, and if others find it beautiful, all the better.

And speaking of which, we hope you all have a beautiful weekend!