Blick Lesson Plans: hundreds of free, original ideas for Art Education!

Combine painting with weaving for a fresh mixed media textile experience! "Found" materials — scraps of felt and fabric, ribbons, cotton yarn, and canvas — can be enhanced with opaque watercolor, providing shading and color gradations.

Reimagine plastic bottles and cups as textural, painted containers perfect for plants and flowers. New, updated content!

Responding to rapid changes in culture and technology, Jackson Pollock's “action painting” expressed a new, modern way of making art. Experience the fun and spontenaity of painting without the use of brushes, then seek out and explore the positive and negative spaces between drips and splashes, defining them with ink lines.

Add an extra layer of surprise to a piqué weaving by using clay coils instead of cording. Crayola Model Magic provides an excellent raised surface, and when adhered directly to the warp of a weaving, creates raised patterns on the woven surface.

Contemporary portrait artist Kehinde Wiley creates multi-layered, modern portraits by using dense, elaborate, wallpaper-like patterning mixed with art historical compositions to heighten the personality and presence of his subject. In this lesson, students can recreate the feeling and energy of a Wiley portrait, without having to hand-paint every element. Printmaking is combined with drawing and watercolor painting, making this project both accessible and engaging for students.

In this lesson, students will explore the use of texture in painting while reflecting on the significance of our impact as humans on the landscape through our production of waste materials. The collected objects collaged onto the canvas can be used in an illustrative way through their unique textures. To enhance this effect, color is added in the form of acrylic paint, and Chroma Molten Metals adds a luminosity to the finished piece.

Transform a rock into fiber art with the help of a common button. A simple, four-sided design known to many as "God's Eye," can be created with cords knotted around a rock and threaded through the holes of a button to hold secure and keep appropriately spaced.

Updated with new featured content In 1913, Marcel DuChamp mounted a spinning bicycle wheel to a stool to make what is considered the first kinetic sculpture. Since then, many artists have paired physical science and engineering with artistic vision to create amazing pieces of mechanical sculpture. This simple, pulley-operated design has students design “gears” that spin on spools when a string is pulled.

Featured with new content! Late in his career, artist Marc Chagall produced a number of paintings in glass with colorful, dream-like images symbolizing peace, love, tolerance and faith. In reality, Marc Chagall’s life was filled with tragic events and the world he lived in was anything but peaceful. In light of this fact, students can begin to understand an artist’s ability to share healing, inspiration and encouragement, using “peace” as a theme.

Featured with new content! Students of all ages can mimic mosaic artisans throughout history with these easy tile-making and “grouting” techniques. Clay tiles are glued to a firm backboard and grouted with Blick Blak Glue.

Featured with updated content! Explore the beauty of batik fabric without the danger of hot wax or dyes. Simply trace a design onto muslin with washable glue and add brilliant permanent color with Marabu Fashion Spray.

Featured with updated content! Andy Warhol, a key figure in the Pop Art movement, “mass-produced” silk-screened portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Transferring an image of themselves onto clay and duplicating it several times, students can experiment with color combinations in portraits, just as Warhol did.

Featured with updated content! A transparent twist on the tunnel book with an in-depth poetry presentation. Students learn how artists create visual depth in art while designing a book that illustrates an eight-line poem they have selected or written.

Featured with updated content! Henri Matisse survived cancer to find a renewed energy and expressionism in artworks he called “scissor paintings.” Inspired by his cut-paper shapes, students can use sunlight or an artificial source to create color-saturated prints on fabric or paper.

Featured with updated content! This project is a simple, tidy way to create the look of pulp painting without the mess of a blender or even the use of adhesive. Non-bleeding tissue paper is combined with water and agitated (torn) so that the paper fibers separate and make a rough pulp. Pressing the paper onto an absorbent (canvas) surface causes the fibers to re-bond with one another and, when dry, form a thicker, stronger paper.

Featured with new content! This simple bookmaking process creates a pyramid that opens to reveal journal pages for hiding secrets, a container for holding “treasure,” or a model of an actual pyramid.

Students design and construct a giant 3-dimensional icon. The surface can be decorated with descriptive words and images that are personally meaningful and unique to the student's identity. Instead of wet, messy adhesive, this process uses paper packing tape to create papier mâché. This tape is inexpensive, easy, and tidy to use.

Featured with updated content Brusho is powdered in crystals that explode into color when they come in contact with water. Use it in combination with wax resist to create lines and shapes that repel water and ccreate divided areas of textural color. No heat required!

Featured with Updated Content! Quilt-making spans multiple centuries and cultures. It can teach math skills, record history, recycle cast-off materials and encourage cooperative efforts within a group...just for a few ideas! This lesson looks at the story quilts of Faith Ringgold. She surrounds her narrative paintings with a quilted border, creating stories in color, texture, and pattern. Students select their own story to illustrate, then paint fabric using watersoluble pastels and watercolor pencils.

A flag can signify an individual, a small group, or a whole nation. In this lesson students will use rubbing plates with Paintstiks, which become permanent when heat set on fabric, to design and create their very own heraldic flag.

With a little bit of sculpture wire, canvas, and plaster it’s easy to create a masterful chime that sounds as beautiful as it looks. Students will learn to play with balance and counterbalance to create a kinetic sculpture that functions as an aesthetically pleasing chime. You won’t believe your eyes…or ears!

Give unwanted and outdated books a new life, while claiming them for your own by writing and illustrating your own version of the story. Consider changing the ending, location, period in time — anything you can dream of!

Basket weaving is a practical art form that is quite possibly the longest enduring handicraft. In this lesson students will create a basket with a slight twist to the standard spokes. Yarn, soaked in glue and placed randomly onto a balloon will provide a free-form network of spokes to weave through and about.

Turn yourself (or friends, family, and pets) into a real, live chia friend! Create a portrait on an expanding sponge, add water, apply some seeds, and watch the “hair” grow and grow!

Turn an old book into a travel journal that stores all kinds of fabulous color finds. Students create their own art kit, then record daily color finds in an organized manner.