Fun Art Project with Kids: Wild Horses

It’s Wednesday, the day Ema comes to assist me at 1+1=1 Gallery. Well, today was early release day from school, so I spent the afternoon with not one — but two — of my favorite young ladies, Ema and Adia. They are always up for an art project after we have our snack and catch up with each other: what’s new in school, what was the most fun you had so far today, what do you think about gardening together this summer, blah blah blah.

Today we made a small herd of wild horses patterned after Ann Wood’s beautiful stampede of horses. She provides a downloadable template for the horses, and a great tutorial so I’m not going to duplicate her wonderful instructions here. This awesome project took us about an hour and a half, including set-up and clean-up.

The horses are pretty easy, but not something I’d recommend for toddlers or really little ones (see adaptation ideas in list below.)

Ideas to Adapt this activity for younger children:

• pre-cut the shapes and have the children paint them. Then an older child or adult may assemble the horses
• use scrapbook papers that are already decorated. Cut the shapes and let children glue the legs on instead of having them be articulated legs
• use bendable brads instead of buttons and wire
• Cut the shapes out of colorful card stock and have younger children brush glue on and sprinkle glitter

Ways to use/display the horses:

• mount with tacky glue, double-sided tape or sticky-mounting-squares onto a foam core or poster board. 
• display directly on a wall using mounting putty.
• the horses don’t all have to be facing the same way.
• arrange the horses on whatever background you are using, so they look energetic and dynamic
• make a mobile of horses using fishing line to hang them.
• use one horse, mounted with re-positionable double sticky tape, to make a greeting card. The receiver of the card can take the horse off to play with.

LINKS:

• Here is the horse pattern by Ann Wood
• Ann Wood makes sweet creatures and botanical thingies of bits of yarn, fabric, wire, metal, sticks and found objects. They are so cute … she makes bride-and-groom cake toppers too. Go see!
• The herd of horses idea was something I had saved on my Pinterest board for summer craft projects. We still have lots of ideas left on the board:  “Ideas for Kids. Playing. Learning.” 
• Did I mention that I love, love love the little thingies Ann Wood makes?

Here are a few more photos of what the girls and I made today: