Spotty Banana Homeschool

It’s officially our ’summer break’ and we have been exploring some fun art activities. We discovered Oil Pastels this year and enjoy them so much, we hardly ever use crayons anymore. Oil pastels are great for helping youngsters build skills in artist techniques, such as blending color, shadowing and layering. Kids enjoy using household ‘tools’ to further enhance their work. We use cotton swabs and tissues for blending, but you should experiment with fingers, tooth picks, coins, tooth brushes, etc. to add texture and remove or blend colors.

Oil pastels can be expensive, so we use student quality instead of artist quality pastels and kid’s sketch paper instead of artist’s sketch paper — these work very well for us.

Our young homeschooler wanted to create his own mini ‘how-to’ for other kids to use, so we created a short video of his ‘lesson’.

Oil Pastel Lesson

For more in-depth technique ideas, we found some great websites:

Fur in the Paint

Elfwood.com

Trading Ideas

How to Draw & Paint