paper and color wheels

After my impassioned post about art supplies, I had quite a few people ask about which papers I recommend for which mediums.  Interestingly I have almost no requirements for the materials on which we create.  This is one area where ecological concerns trump quality supplies for me; because we are such prolific creators, we try to re-use as much as we can.  We keep a stash or old school papers that still have one clean side and that is our go to source of paper.  We each have our own clipboard to take loose papers out to draw in the yard or for on long road trips.

If you ARE buying paper for a specific project here's some suggestions.

For crayons, the nice, rough, toothy paper that most coloring books are made of is great.

For pencil, colored pencils, markers or ink pens we each fill several unlined, spiral bound sketchbooks with drawings every year. The spiral binding makes it lay flat without your having to hold it down, and we usually do only use one side of the page in these since ink often shows through to the back of the page and the spiral binding gets in the way of your hand on the other side too.

I have a roll of trace paper kicking around from my previous career and the kids LOVE to trace stuff. It may seem like a cheat to just trace something, but I think they get some valuable practice by putting lines into shapes, and then shapes together to see how other artists/photographers captured their subjects.

We also like to play with graph paper and fill in patterns or zig zagging rainbow stripes or blocking out letters; usually with colored pencils or markers.

For pastels, you can check in the art supply section of your craft stores, and you'll probably find pads of "pastel paper" (not that they are necessarily pastel colored, though some will have different colored papers and I'd recommend the colored ones) The "pastel papers" have a rough texture to grab the pigment, but we use a lot of colored card stock, construction paper or the insides of brown paper bags for pastels too.

Obviously, canvases are great for painting on and make you feel like a very important. or at least. a legitimate artist, but it's not practical to keep very many stretched canvases per kid over a lifetime. We tend to use acrylic paints on stuff out of the recycling bin, insides of cereal boxes and toilet paper tubes being our favorites.

We watercolor on card stock mostly. It doesn't get too soggy. There is also specific watercolor paper in the art supply section, and it will be labeled on the front of the pad. I'll post a trick to get water colors to dry flat soon, but I don't have pics for it tonight.

Here's one of our projects this week. We took some old magazines and Weekly Readers that we'd saved and made color wheel collages on the insides of cereal boxes. The kids were less excited about this project than I thought they'd be. (mine's the middle one, but AJ claims it since he glued a few of the pieces on) But later in the week I found J playing with the trains and he showed me how he'd lined all the trains up in color wheel order. So something was learned after all.