Egg Artiste
It’s been a few months I think since I wrote a Virtual Book Club for Kids post because we hadn’t really done anything for about two months or so. We read several books for February’s author, Paul Galdone, but we didn’t really do any activities to go with the books. We had started on making a little stick house for The Three Little Pigs but then Connor dropped it so it broke, perhaps we should have built a mini brick house instead.
March’s author was Marcus Printer and that is what I’ll be writing about today. The book we read was Henri, Egg Artiste and it works perfectly with Easter.
Henri is an egg artiste, his wife Henrietta gathers the eggs for him and then he paints them and on Easter hides them for kids to find. This year however he wants to paint the eggs differently. He tells Henrietta that he’s tired of the same eggs and he’s sure the kids are too. When he finally starts painting eggs his painting are based off of works from famous painters like Monet and Da Vinci.
In the back of the book you can find all of the paintings that inspired Henri’s eggs so we looked at them and then I told the boys that they were going to paint an egg with their own version of Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow. I picked this one just because I figured it would be easiest for them to paint on an egg.
We actually didn’t have any orange paint so I gave them both red and yellow paint and they mixed their own orange. Connor mixed all of his red and yellow paint together so he had more of a red orange but JT only used a little bit of the red so he ended up with a nice orange color. Once Connor saw JT’s he realized he used too much red so he added in some extra yellow. Once they finished mixing their colors they started painting.
Connor painted his egg more like the actual painting with the yellow on top and the orange on the bottom. JT swirled the colors around his egg.
After they had finished painting their orange and yellow eggs I gave them a piece of paper with an outline of egg that I had drawn on it. What I originally wanted them to do was pick one of the other paintings in the book and paint their own version on their paper. They didn’t want to do that though, they said they wanted to paint their own thing so that’s what they did. Connor said that sometimes paintings show feelings so that is what he wanted to do.
In the book Henrietta suggested to Henri that he use grass to dye some eggs like he had done before so I thought that we could try to make our own dye as well. Our front yard was almost entirely filled with pink flowers so I thought that might work well but I waited to long to try this and the grass got cut before we could pick the flowers. There were still a few but not nearly enough. We decided to try it anyways. We picked all the flowers we could find and then put them in a pot on the stove with some water.
I waited a just a short while to see what would happen and after they had boiled the color was completely gone from the flowers so we added in a bunch of tiny green leaves from a bush in the backyard. The liquid we ended up with looked brownish. Only JT dyed an egg in it and it came out yellow. The picture of it doesn’t look very bright but it looks just about the same color as the yellow egg we have that was dyed with egg dye from the store.
A few months ago I had also wanted to try pointillism with them so we could see how using that technique two different colors next to each other end up looking like one color. I decided we could try this with the eggs but the eggs were difficult to work with so it didn’t go so well. I gave them red and yellow paint again and gave them straws with a point cut out on one end so they could make dots.
The last thing the boys did was dye the rest of the eggs with egg dye purchased from the store. They used the one that comes with the magic crayon so they can draw a design on the egg before they dye it.
We still have another dozen eggs or so that are ready for them to decorate so they will be doing some egg art this week.
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