Holiday ATC's for kids . . .

Wait - commercial first, in case you don't read to the end - Don't forget about the giveaway in last night's post!

Okay, back to the topic at hand. I've told you before that I teach an artist trading card class on Friday afternoons at the neighborhood school. I have about 20 K-6th graders that come each week. We've been working on the Elements of Art and Principles of Design through different drawing and printing techniques. We just made our 1st collage a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was time to teach them about fairies. Are you surprised? We're going to make Christmas fairies today.

You can get matte sticker paper at your local office supply store - 30 sheets for around $12 I think. I made sets of collage pieces and printed them on the sticker paper in quarter sections. I cut the sections apart so that each child will get everything they need to make one ATC in a quarter size sticker paper section.



(I had to watermark this example so I didn't violate other people's copyrights)

I am lucky that everyone celebrates the same holiday so it made it simple for me to do this. If you have a multi-cultural class that celebrates more than one holiday, you'll have to take that into consideration and make appropriate sticker sheets. You could do icey winter colors and make winter ATC's if nothing else.

I recently bought digital collage sheets from lisasalteredart's shop. They are great! You can't beat $2 a sheet for lots of adorable children with backgrounds already cut away for you. I used Lisa's children but I zoomed in and cropped away arms and legs so that kids didn't have so much to cut around. I made hats using some labels from my Dover clipart and cropped them in photoshop. The wings I used for this project I actually paid a licensing fee to use in my art (since I use wings in every darn thing I make, it was worth it). I'm sure you can find some wings though. Lisa has wings too and so does Suppliestogo.etsy.com and Greatmusings.etsy.com. The stripes and word boxes I made in microsoft publisher.

After I got the pieces laid out - I printed on the sticker paper in draft quality. The kids aren't going to care too much about the quality and ink is expensive. It took minutes to print out 15 sheets - enough for my kids to make 3 fairy ATC's each - one to trade and two to keep. Another few minutes to trim the sheets to quarter sheet size sets. And, it took minutes to make my sample - kept it simple so kids see what they are going to make, nothing fancy no extras. We are using old playing cards as backgrounds since they are already festively red. (okay, it is driving me crazy not to color in, shade, glitter, add more elements, and "trick this card out" as my kids would say, but logistics wouldn't allow the kids to do that, so . . . )



The biggest challenge with young kids is the cuttin out part. You have to remind them to move the paper around not their scissors or hands. I'm sure we'll have some lopped off heads and ears, but I have extras and we'll talk about Picasso too.

Anyhoo - if you needed an idea for a winter party activity for a classroom, there ya go. No glue, no mess and trading encouraged.

Don't forget about the giveaway in the post below!