Solar System Model and Colored Pencil Blending

We did an art lesson from I Can Do All Things today on colored pencil blending. I have to say this was one of the lessons that seemed like a good idea, but then didn’t go so well. Maybe it is the brand of our colored pencils, but they didn’t blend so well, most the colors turned grayish when blended. The only one that really worked was the blue + yellow = green combo. Oh well…live and learn! Also since it wasn’t really working, they lost interest quickly!

So moving right on then…(we’ll just pretend that last thing never happened!) We are working on a model of our solar system for our co-op science fair coming up at the end of this month. We blended different play-doh colors to make swirls and then wrapped the Styrofoam balls in the play-doh. I have to say the model magic stuff that came with this kit was NOT good. It was crumbly and didn’t blend well, so we ended up using our regular play-doh which was much smoother to work with. The balls are drying now, so I’m just hoping that the dough stays on the balls and doesn’t crack off into a million pieces…only time will tell! We’ll be working on this all week, so I’ll try to post updates to our progress!

My son was disgruntled to hear that they didn’t count Pluto as a planet, but was made happy again when he found out he was in charge of the sun.

Of course no play-doh project can just end, it has to go on until all remaining pieces of dough are cut into the tiniest possible chunks before we can call the project complete. Also, for my 3yr old it usually involves making a cake with candles and singing happy birthday to herself.

Later, all the play-doh shrunk, cracked and fell off of our planets, so we ended up painting them instead! All’s well that ends well, or so they say…