Summer Stamps
Summer can mean so many colorful things: blue skies, green grass, purple wildflowers, turquoise water, green leaves and blueberries. We are celebrating the coolest colors of summer with this stamping activity!
The Carle currently has Robert McCloskey’s exhibit Americana on Parade: the Art of Robert McCloskey in our East Gallery. McCloskey’s book Blueberries for Sal is the quintessential summertime story, and was our inspiration for this project. Using blue paint and cool-colored papers guests are creating patterns with handmade stamps and oil pastels.
We have shared several other printmaking activities over the years on the blog, specifically making your own stamps and stamp pads like those we used for this activity. For this version, we encouraged guests to create a pattern that can be repeated across their strips of cool-colored paper. We prepared sets of three colors in various cool shades like baby blue, turquoise, lavender, neon green. Some sets also had neutral papers like black or gray.
The oil pastel drawings really pop against the cool color backgrounds and blue patterns.
We’ve been switching out the different designs daily on our front bulletin board.
Guests are having a great time with this perfect summertime activity!
I’m sad to say that this will by my last post for a while. I will be leaving my position as Art Educator at The Carle this summer to pursue a full-time graduate program at Mount Holyoke College to earn my Masters of Arts in Teaching Visual Arts. I hope to continue sharing art activities from time to time next year, but I will no longer be a regular contributor. Teaching in the Art Studio the past nine years has allowed me to work with visitors from all around the world, and grown as an art educator in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I will most of all miss working with my fabulous co-workers in the Art Studio. The Art Studio’s ever-changing team of creative interns, volunteers and work study students makes our wide range of art programming all possible. Thank you, and goodbye for now!
