Line is one of the art elements that you can explore with your children and have plenty of fun doing. This crazy hair art activity is a wonderful activity for exploring lines with your kids. It is also great for 'All about Me' theme activity as it is about self-portrait, except not the regular kind but self portrait with funky / crazy / funny hair whichever you can want to call it.
Before you do this art activity with your kids, you may want to introduce and explore different kind of lines with them first. My children loved it when I told them that a line is actually a moving dot. You always start with a dot and then you move it anyway you like and you will have a line. If you move straight then you will have a straight line, up and down and you have a zigzag line, wavy and you will have a curvy lines, etc. Show and draw the lines with a marker on your board as you explain these and then let the children explore and move their 'dots' to form lines use drawing tools on giant piece of paper. The perfect introductory group activity.
After they are done, you can go through the different kind of lines they have drawn. You can add on and show them other types of lines that are not in their drawings if you like. Some examples of the different kind of lines are straight lines, curvy lines, dotted lines, zigzag lines, horizontal lines, vertical lines, wavy lines, thick lines, thin lines, spiral and many more.
After exploring the different kind of lines, you are ready to create the crazy hair portrait activity with the kids. Our hair are just like lines too, there are straight hair, wavy, curly, short, long hair, etc. But the portraits that they are going to create are funny ones because they have to draw themselves with crazy / funny / funky hair using all the different types of line they have learnt.
I used A4 size paper for this activity because when the paper is too large, the kids have more space to fill up / color / paint and they can get tired, thus losing joy and interest. But that is just based on my experience, feel free to use large drawing blocks if you want to!
The first thing you need to do is draw a portrait of just a face and half the body at the bottom of the page. Then fill up the space with hair using different kind of lines in different direction.
Some variations that you can do:
Some boys may not like to have long, flowy hair. They can draw these 'trolls' hair as I call it, just like the animation characters. This vibrant piece of art is created with water color, black marker and color pencils. If you want to use water colors, do make sure that the markers you use are permanent markers.
Another variation is to leave the portrait black and white but create a colorful outlines around it to fill up the page. This hypnotising beautiful artwork is created with black marker and oil pastel.
A contrasting piece with water color and color pencil. Black and white hair and colorful shirt. I think this one really show case the lines.
Another beautiful piece showcasing a ponytail! A very colorful artwork using oil paster, color pencil and water color.
Those are just a few examples and there are many other ways you can create this art work. Provide a few choices of materials like water color, markers, color pencil, oil pastel, etc and let your kids explore to create their own masterpiece using lines. One other variation that will be so cool is the invisible hair portrait. Let the children draw the hair using white oil pastel and then fill up the page with water colors to reveal the invisible hair.