When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

Well there was bound to be one day during our 'Art week' that Opeie wasn't all that bothered about, Cutting shapes out of a piece of coloured paper and sticking them down was never going to have the same appeal to a 4 year old as throwing paint around the garden but the whole idea of the week was to show Opeie some different art styles and to show that pretty much anything can be deemed as art.

Our artist of the day was Henri Matisse and his paper cut out style of art. We started with a piece of coloured/patterned paper, cut shapes out and flipped and mounted them on a larger piece of white paper making positive and negative shapes. It was a nice quick activity but as I said Opeie didn't really get in to today's art so I'm going to have to really think about something more entertaining for our next activity.

Our morning of Matisse ending in Opeie doing multi coloured scribbles and us creating a fox paper aeroplane so in the end a great start to a day of creativity.

"To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect."

Continuing our week of art and with yesterday's Jackson Pollock paint flicking activity in the garden going so well, we moved on to a new artist with a completely different artistic medium. Alexander Calder was our artist of today and Opeie was looking forward to having some of his creations suspended from the ceiling.

We started by drawing some obscure shapes on different coloured sheets of paper. Then our friends Sam and Jamie visited, so Sam joined in and helped. We cut the shapes out and using transparent cord made a hole in each shape and thread it through. We used 3 straws and tied one of our shapes to each of the 6th ends. Our creation was really droopy which was great as it gave me a chance to explain balance to Opeie and how we shift the weight along the straw to suspend the piece evenly.

The end result was really effective and it was great seeing Opeie's art delicately sway as we opened doors or passed by. It was an important lesson for Opeie in art as he understands more now that art can be created in many forms. We'll definitely be doing this again when Opeie is a little older using wire or metal rods and shapes made of different materials. Calder's other works include wire sculptures which we will also be attempting at some point soon. 

Tomorrows artist in our week of art will be Henri Matisse so stay tuned.