Saturday, April 5, 2014

Having Fun With Art Projectors and Your Kids

Image: http://www.artograph.com/
Many moons ago I wanted to put a mural on my wall. A mural of none-less than The Punisher.

To do that I used a transparency and an overhead projector (remember those old timers?)

My parents being open to the idea, let me put a large Punisher diving with a very large gun behind my weight set in our basement. It was cool! I am not sure they knew what they were getting into.

Fast forward many years and I did a painting that I thought would be great in triplicate, but how to copy the original to 2 more canvases? Step in the Art Projector/Tracer.

I bought the Artograph Tracer, took a photo of the original artwork, printed that out in black and white, and then proceeded to transfer/trace it onto two new canvases. Then I went to work painting those. I am still pleased with the result.  Here they are, the Yellow was the original:


Flash forward to the topic for today, having fun, well, more fun with Art Projectors and your kids in particular. Kids love to do art and they have lots of beloved characters. What better way to have fun than to copy some of their favorite characters onto large sheets of paper and then paint/colour those.

We did that the past two days and they had a blast. I could not tear these two boys from the machine. I gave them each 2 tracings and then sent them off to colour their new artworks. They had fun and enjoyed making larger versions of some of their favorite characters.

Here are some pics of what we did.

I traced this Samurai:

And Finn helped me colour most of it:


Then Finn wanted a Cat in the Hat:


Harrison wanted a Pokemon:















This all started with this box of Puffin Cereal:

So I did a Puffin for the boys, with a little help from Finn:
 

This was a fun activity which I underestimated would be such a winner. The boys were engaged for hours colouring and helping setup, trace, and then hang their works.

If you have a tracer this is a fun afternoon activity on a rainy day.

As well, if you pick up a tracer, they can be super fun for tracing children's characters onto the kids walls and then painting those. The kids will love it and you can really make their room theirs.

For me, we have moved so many times I have taken to tracing onto canvases and then painting those. This way the kids can take the works with them when we move again.

2 comments:

Monte Kearley said...

Great puffin! I got an old school projector and transparencies gathering dust in the basement... Ought to let the kids at it. I picked it up some years ago for this purpose but kids weren't old enough then.


I bet your gizmo burns less electricity than mine 😀

Unknown said...

Mine heats up the image pretty high. I once used it with the boys to melt a crayon. We watched the projection of the crayon large on the wall as it finally hit it's melting point and just liquefied before our eyes and ran all over the page we had it on. It was a blast bit made a mess. I am still removing the old crayon remnants from the projector.

As for transparency, that works fine. Just trace the art first and then project.

Transparencies also tend to allow you to show more detail with the black and white of it. With the image projector I use, if there is low contrast areas in the image then those are hard to detect and hence trace.