Bubbles Art Project Using Oil Pastels and Paint

Bubbles Art Appreciation Activity and Playing with Bubbles

Bright oil pastels on black construction paper are so lovely! We enjoyed our art appreciation activity and bubbles art project after making and observing bubbles. Our previous bubbles activities can be found here: Honey Bubble Math. Bubble Making Experiments for Preschoolers .

Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais

The most famous painting by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is "A Child's World", later know as "Bubbles." Sir John enjoyed child pictures. "Bubbles" is a painting of his 5 year old grandson using oil on canvas. This representation of the artist's awareness on the present moment is wonderful!

The goal of our art appreciation discussion was to discover that the picture can tell a beautiful story. All we have to do is pay attention to details.

Some questions we discussed:

• What can we see in this picture?
• This boy's name is William. What do you think he is doing?
• William made his bubble more then a hundred years ago. Can you notice any details in this picture that tell us a story of the old times? His cloths? The way he makes his bubbles? Anything else? Why do you think the artist used dark brown colors around the boy?
• Do you think William likes his bubble? What do you think he could say at that moment?



Oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, England

Bubbles Art Project

For this project we used:
black construction paper, white tempera paint, plastic cups/ bottles of different sizes, oil pastels.
Kids dipped cups turned upside down into white paint on the plate. They used plastic cups of different sizes to stamp circles of various diameters onto the paper.

This activity was set when kids came in after having fun with bubbles outside. They enjoyed their painting very much! The important point for us was to offer them a fresh new paper when the space on the previous one was filled with bubbles.

Coloring Bubbles with Oil Pastels

After the paint was dry, we set to color the bubbles with oil pastels.

According to our observations while making bubbles: we could see through bubbles because they were translucent. Transparent lets all the light through, opaque lets no light through, translucent is everything in between. We could see the rainbow of colors, mainly around the bubbles with some coloring as a light reflection on the side.

We started coloring the bigger bubbles first, one bubble at a time. My Firefly was asked to pull 4-6 different bright colors from the box. This colors were used one by one to color the inner side of a circle. For the smallest bubbles and the spots inside the bubbles we chose only 2 colors.

More Art Appreciation and Playing activities for preschoolers from My Bright Firefly:

Over in the Forest: Leaves Collage and Forest Small World

Rocks and Model Magic Volcano

Sunset on the Fields Art Project Inspired by Vincent van Gogh

 

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