Whenever I see stretched canvases on special, I grab a few in various sizes to use for art projects. I love hanging children’s art on the wall. It places value on their creativity and ideas, and it looks great. In fact I would have to say that children’s artwork is one of my favourite choices for decorating.
Immy recently created the two collages shown below on canvas using pre-cut fabric shapes, buttons and lengths of wool. One of her artworks is much more representative – in her words, ‘It is a girl at the beach,’ – while the other is more abstract. They are now hanging together in one corner of my study (though Immy has asked me to put them in her bedroom instead!)
We have previously created a pair of monochromatic blue collages on canvases that hang in our playroom. Children do not always need a rainbow of colours to create with and limiting the collage material colour palette provides them with the opportunity to focus more on the shapes, textures and opacity of the objects presented.
If you are planning a painted artwork on canvas to keep and display and are wanting to avoid the muddy brown that often results when young children mix all of the colours together, limiting the colour palette works here as well – which is what I did for this big artwork;
You can see here how we created our ‘going BIG’ project that now hangs in Immy’s bedroom.
The other great thing about working on canvas is that you can paint over an artwork once you are ready for something new. Just paint over the original artwork with an undercoat, like I did with our drip painting experiment (I was too impatient to paint a second coat of the undercoat which it probably needed but I kind of like the effect of the stripes running in the alternative direction to the drips, which shows through from the painting underneath!);
Immy’s drip painting and blue collages are displayed side by side in the book corner of our playroom.
Tape art is another technique that works well on canvas – and it looks great as an abstract work or as a tape monogram artwork like the one that takes pride of place in Immy’s bedroom.
How do you display your child’s artworks around your home?
For more great ideas for kids art, check out my book – Time to Create
Christie Burnett is a teacher, presenter, writer and the mother of two. She created Childhood 101 as a place for teachers and parents to access engaging, high quality learning ideas.
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