Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of June 14th!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action assignment is to make a random mosaic-like pattern with markers or pencils. A mosaic is when someone takes little tiles and arranges them to make either a picture or a pattern (like a tiled floor). In this case, we’re just drawing a pattern out.

Supplies

paper

markers or pencils or crayons (etc.)

Optional: different kinds of stencils, rulers, or shapes to trace, if you don’t want to draw “freehand”

How do I do it?

The main goal today is really about playing with color and using graphical patterns to make an interesting looking mosaic-like picture. This is a really fun project to do.

There are a couple of different ways to do this.

The first way is to draw in the black lines first. Just start out with a black marker or pencil, and make random (or deliberate) lines all over your paper, crossing over other lines, so that you have lots of small sections all over your paper to color in. Next, select out some colors, and color in your areas.

The other possibility, which my kids showed me, is to start with your colors, and just draw patterns with your colors all over the paper, as you see above.

Going Forward

This can be a great way to play around with color, and find out what colors work well together and which do not. Try to use this idea to make interesting posters, or designs to hang up.

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.