Tree Frog Art

Isn't he a cheery guy?

The one on the left was done by Little Brother with help on the eyes.  The one on the right was done my Sweet Pea (with help on the eyes and background). 

We've been doing colors lately and one of the books I checked out was Red Eyes or Blue Feathers A Book About Animal Colors by Patricia M. Stockland.  We read it, but couldn't really think of what activity we would do to go with it...and then Gail on That Artist Woman came through with this Woven Eye Frog Project.  I adapted an image I found online to get mine.

I started by having the kids paint a the cardboard for the eyes (be sure to see the tutorial link above).  If I was doing it again, I'd still have them paint those green, but would have them paint the middle red. 

Then they painted their whole frog green.  Next, I pointed out how it's toes were red and it's belly was blue and gave them those colors.  For Sweet Pea, I did our typical routine where I drop paint globs for her and she spread them. 

Little Brother had mostly free reign. 

Then after the paint dried, I cut the frogs out for them and added the details with a sharpie marker.

Next, I also had them paint backgrounds.  My original plan was to give them leaf templates and have them sponge the edges, so when we removed the template, we'd be left with the image of the leaf in the negative space.  That would have worked beautifully, except neither of them got the negative space concept at all, and all Little Brother wanted to do was paint the template.  Oh well!  We compromised at him painting the leaf and enough beyond to leave the outline.  Then we used the painted template to act as a stamp and then attached it to the painting. 

And when we were done with that Little Brother still HAD to paint, so I put the background out to try before he could cover it with green...and gave him another paper to fill with green instead.

 After it dried on a seperate day, he really wanted to get the paints out, so I gave his background back to him along with some lighter green and a smooshed toilet paper tube to make some different leaf shapes (idea from here). 

I think I would prefer these if the greens in the background varied more from the green in the frog...but the way it is emphasizes the idea that the frog blends in well with it's surroundings, which is the main concept in the book.

Then we glued the frogs onto their backgrounds with Mod Podge.  If I had regular kid glue, I might have used that, but the Mod Podge does make it stick really well without getting the paper all marbled up. 

I did the weaving of the eyes for the kids.  I tried to get Little Brother to help with his, but he wasn't interested in that part.  I don't have many different colors of yarn, so I cut up T-shirt scraps into strips and used those instead.  After weaving the red around the circles, I wrapped black to make the vertical strips.  Then I glued those on with a hot glue gun.

And they were done!  This is another one of those projects that took several sessions...and took a little more parent help than our fall trees did, but I still like how they look.  Sweet Pea especially loves them and shows them to us several times a day and makes a hopping motion with her hand.

And if you want to make your own, here is the template.  I think if you click on the picture itself, it should show up bigger and you can resize it to fit your needs.

I'm linking to: