Crafts For Lazy Moms: Pointillism

I did my student teaching in an arts magnet school. I blame the experience for starting my prejudice against kids doing cutesy projects as "art". Kids are born artists, but they'll never develop their creativity if we just keep having them copy adult designed projects over and over.

But in addition to my philosophical problem with cutesy "art", I'm also lazy. I don't want to spend an hour cutting out construction paper shapes or prepping my dining room for kid painting time only to have the kids finish the project in 5 minutes.

Pointillism is a style of art, pioneered by Georges Seurat in the late 19th century, where artists use dots of paint to create one mass or object. Seurat and his contemporaries used two or more dots of different colors, dabbed adjacent to each other, to create other colors. That's an activity for real art teachers, not those of us trying to keep our kids entertained on long afternoons.

But we can take the basics of pointillism and have our kids make dot art; I've seen kids as young as 6 work on dot art for 2 hours. I've seen preschoolers work on dot art for 45 minutes. That's a good chunk of time for a rainy Saturday.

I suggest reading a picture book or two before the activity, but you don't have to. Your local library probably has some kids books on Seurat, but you can also get some good ones from Amazon:


(These are affiliate links. Please use them so I can make a buck. Literally.)

Pointillism Activity:

• Have kids do a pencil drawing on a half sheet of paper (if your kids are very patient, you can use a full sheet, if they are on the younger side use a quarter sheet).
• Emphasize that they should NOT color anything in. 
• Get out markers and show them how to make dots.
• Have them practice making dots on a piece of scrap paper.
• Then let them "color in" their pencil drawing by making dots with markers. (See my picture above for what it might look like).
• If you want to be less lazy, you can have them use paints and Q-tips to make the dots. 
• When everything is dry, have them erase the pencil drawing. 

There's an entire musical devoted to Seurat, so you can always waste a little more time letting the kids watch excerpts of it on YouTube: