Get creative with your children this Easter
With home schooling now on hiatus, LucyDavies looks at great artistic activities for the holidays
I’m assuming that the fervour of your home-schooling ambitions has dampened in recent days. Mine absolutely has. Instead, I’ve begun to think of other ways in to keep my children’s grey matter ticking over, while also encouraging their imaginations to flourish.
This week, we’ve turned the playroom wall into an ocean, to which the children add fish and other sea creatures each day. Next, we might copy a friend who has painted Yayoi Kusama-inspired circles on her front steps.
Many artists, museums and publishers have stepped into the breach, too. Listed below are some tutorials, activities and books for art and art history that I’ve unearthed. All have been tested on (mostly) willing, age-appropriate subjects.
If you need a goal, try the new Bourlet Young Masters’ Art Prize, whipped into being last week for the under-12s and in aid of the Cavell Nurses’ Trust. Bourlet, whose frames have graced paintings by Monet and Matisse, is offering prizes that include a trip to London to see your child’s work exhibited in Philip Mould’s Pall Mall gallery, along with £150 vouchers for Cass Art.
“If you don’t know where to begin, a theme to respond to is a good start,” says the portrait artist Lorna May Wadsworth, one of the judges. “And remind kids there’s no such thing as a mistake, only happy accidents. Francis Bacon’s mantra, no less!”
Things to do
Pallant House Gallery
How about building a robot inspired by pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi? Or making a Futurist paper puppet? The Pallant House Gallery website has instructions. pallant.org.uk/learnwith-us/creative-activities-at-home
@Down_up_down_up
A “school” set up on Instagram by Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Among the tasks posted this week is making a Flat Stanley (lie down on some paper, get somebody Flat out: Juno Whitfield making her Flat Stanley, main; Gregosaurus drawn by Beatrice West Vile, top right; ABCS of Art, right; Paolozzi robots, below to draw around you, decorate, cut it out, fold it up, post it!). Art Making with MOMA New York’s Museum of Modern Art has 20 artistinspired activities, such as construct a wearable sculpture (inspired by Nick Cave) or stamp with your body (inspired by Janine Antoni). moma. org /magazine/ articles/254
@Tussenkunst enquarantaine
This Instagram account encourages you to recreate works of art using whatever you have to hand. Thousands of people have taken part already, producing Vermeers, Magrittes, Manets with plastic buckets, towels and vacuum cleaners. Art Is Where the Home Is
Grayson Perry, Antony Gormley, Gillian Wearing and others have joined forces with Firstsite gallery to produce a downloadable pack of activities that don’t require special equipment. firstsite.uk/art-is-wherethe-home-is Isolation Art School posts projects and lessons from practising artists on its Instagram account. We tried the Easter card, which uses the polystyrene discs you get in the back of a supermarket-bought pizza. There’s also a good quoits game made from bits of cardboard.
Creativity 4 Wellbeing
Holburne Museum’s virtual art group posts an activity every Wednesday at midday. Recent projects include giving Gainsborough’s portrait of the Byam family a fashion makeover and making a Georgian-style paper fan. holburne.org
Young Design Museum
A new programme for primary and secondary children with lesson plans and worksheets, including some themed for the TV series Hey Duggee. designmuseum.org /digital-designcalendar/young-design-museum You Are an Artist
A new book by the curator Sarah Urist Green, who hosts the popular web series The Art Assignment. Look for the “With Kids” list at the back of the book
Art to Go
A video series from Kettle’s Yard, all designed with everyday materials in mind. Rana Begum, for instance, leads a straw workshop. Meanwhile, the gallery’s Linder exhibition, which closed early, provides brilliant collage inspo: simply cut out pictures of lips, statues, etc, from magazines and off you go. kettlesyard.co.uk
Drawing tutorials
Harry Potter at Home
Among the zillions of quizzes on JK Rowling’s Wizarding World website is a section titled “Wizarding Wednesdays”, with instructions on how to draw, for instance, a Niffler. wizardingworld.com/collections/ crafting-magic
#Drawwithrob
Children’s illustrator Rob Biddulph has launched a weekly draw-along video for kids to reproduce characters from his books, such as Gregosaurus and Sausage Dog. They go live at 10am every Tuesday and Thursday on social media and are available thereafter on his website. robbiddulph.com 1
Culture Newsletter
Sign up for Tristram Fane Saunders’ newsletter, out every Thursday telegraph.co.uk/culturenewsletter
Sharing Stories
On the Stratford Literary Festival’s website, you can learn to draw the crime-busting heroine of Julia Donaldson’s What the Ladybird Heard or recreate Sarah Mcintyre’s Grumpycorn. stratfordliterary festival.co.uk/article/sharing-stories
Art history books
The Lonesome Puppy, by Yoshitomo Nara
Nara is one of the coolest artists working today, known for his simultaneously sweet/sinister paintings of animals and children. This story is about a puppy so large that no one notices him until a determined little girl climbs high enough to become his friend. A History of Pictures by David Hockney and Martin Gayford
An adventure through art history, from cave paintings to video games. Also, Meet the Artist: David Hockney is a great activity book (I like the page where you have to draw different kinds of splashes on a pool surface).
Meeting Cézanne
by Michael Morpurgo
The War Horse author adapts the true story of a boy who accidentally threw a tablecloth, which had been doodled on by Picasso, into a fireplace. Each title in the Anholt’s Artists series has a real child as the protagonist, “so a young reader can piggyback their way into the story”, explains author and illustrator Lawrence Anholt. ABCS of Art by Sabrina Hahn
This excellent book uses well-known paintings to help younger children learn the alphabet, and the “and Wasn’t Sorry” series from Phaidon is wonderfully irreverent – Jackson Pollock Splashed Paint and Wasn’t Sorry, etc. We also enjoyed The Boy Who Bit Picasso by Antony Penrose.
Video
Art with Mati and Dada
Artists from Degas to Canaletto get the cartoon treatment on Youtube. (I’m sure if you watch enough of them they’ll grate, but the two or three I tried were pretty charming).
Tate Kids
Unsurprisingly a gold mine. What is surrealism? What is Pop Art? Who was Robert Rauschenberg? Jacqueline Wilson on her favourite art. Paint with chocolate. You can also download colouring-in pages. tate.org.uk/kids