Dinosaur Artist

For Holly's birthday she received a book on various art projects you can do about dinosaurs. Many of them are drawing, sketching, coloring and painting inspired art works. She has been loving this book and exploring it a lot.

She has sat down and followed the various step by step instructions on how to create dinosaurs. Her art is so cute and personally I am impressed at her ability to take her time and really try out the project at hand with pretty good success. Granted she is five and her art work is a child's work, but I think she has done a really nice job and most of all is having a lot of fun while doing it... and that is what is important!

Here she had to draw the dinosaur in a step by step method and erase the parts not used in the final product. She then drew a simple scene and water colored the picture. You can see her artwork and then the book teaching her.

Here she drew the dinosaur (green one) with a home made dinosaur (not sure what it is) chasing it through a scene of stickers. Again, her drawing is first and then the book.
Finally here she did water color eggs in various colors with either dinosaurs hatching out of the tops of the eggs or the middles peeping through. Below her painting is the books example she copied. This one was a lot harder for her to do, not sure why but it was. She worked through it though and was happy with her final project.

Illustrations by...

Lately Holly has been very interested in who has illustrated the books we are reading. She has even made connections between various books with the same illustrators. For example she knows that Jane Chapman has illustrated all of the 'Bear Books' and a book called 'The Very Busy Day' -- done by different authors. I personally find this pretty impressive she has noticed considering we own hundreds of books.

She has also began drawing pictures and pointing out that she is the illustrator of her artwork.

This morning she wrote a small 'story' and did a great drawing... however, her main focus was to make sure she wrote 'illustrations by Holly'. She picked out a book and copied the words down and added her name. Pretty cool!

Here is her little story, which is based off of our group camping trip to Staircase this summer. The kids all played in the water next to our campsite and swimming hole, they built little rock walls in the river to pool the water up (many hours spent doing this). Here is her version, in her own words (she sounded them out herself):

"The rivr was fun. I plad with Kevin, Kristin, Droo, Ean. Illustrations By Holly"

The river was fun. I played with Kevin, Kristin, Drew and Ian. Illustrations by Holly.

Not bad for four years old!