Category Archives: art kits

How is your Halloween Spirit?

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As fallen leaves carpet the ground with brilliant shades of brown, yellow, red and orange, a variety of strange and spooky images start to appear creating Halloween Spirit. Ghosts and ghouls hang from trees, carved pumpkins and gnarled broomsticks appear on doorsteps, spiders weave webs across windows and gravestones turn up on front lawns.

Halloween art sets the stage for the scariest and fun holiday of the year.

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The most common images in Halloween art include:

ghosts and haunted houses
witches, broomsticks and cauldrons
pumpkins and jack o’lanterns
spiders and cobwebs
monsters
werewolves
vampires and bats
skulls and skeletons
gravestones

Both adults and children alike enjoy creating Halloween arts and crafts that bring these strange and macabre images to life. Here are some hands-on ideas for Halloween arts and crafts:

Color in Halloween images with markers, crayons, paint, or even digitally using your computer
Cut outlines of spiders, bats, and witches’ hats out of black paper
Cut out body parts from magazines and paste them on thick paper to make your own monsters
Create your own gravestone using black marker on grey paper
Draw a pair of eyes and a wide, smiling mouth full of teeth on a pumpkin, and carve it out to create a jack o’lantern

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To get in the holiday spirit, hang your 2-D Halloween arts and crafts in your front windows or on your front door. Place your 3-D Halloween art projects on your doorstep or front lawn.
The most exciting form of “Halloween art” is your costume!

Whether you are a 7 years old or 77 years old, on October 31 you can transform yourself into someone (or something) else. This is where your imagination has free reign – you can change your appearance however you want by wearing a costume, a wig, and/or make-up. Whether you are the one trick-or-treating or the one answering the door with a bowl of candy, Halloween is a holiday full of surprises, where nothing is quite what it seems.

Read more Segmation blog posts about Art:

Colors Solve the “Monster Mash” Mystery

“The Pixel Painter”

Art Beneath Your Feet

Be a Artist in 2 minutes with Segmation SegPlay® PC (see more details here)

Learn to Make a Custom Paint by Number Pillow

“Paint by Number” Kits Create Thousands of Artists

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To be considered an artist, must someone necessarily conceive of the subject of their artwork in their own mind, or is it acceptable for them to use a “blueprint” provided by another artist? Dan Robbins, the designer of “paint by number” art kits, would agree that individuals can indeed use patterns to assist them in art making and still be accepted as legitimate artists.

Dan Robbins designed paint by number, a product that allows people to paint pictures according to set patterns, in the 1950s. Max Klein, who was the president of the Palmer Paint Company, sought Robbins out as the designer of the yet-to-be discovered product that would later be known as paint by number. Robbins was admonished by Klein to conceive of and design a product that could help anyone become an artist.

Robbins looked to Leonardo da Vinci for inspiration in his endeavor to create a phenomenal art product. (This is because Da Vinci was known to supply his apprentices with “numbered patterns” on which to paint.) Robbins wondered why the same principle Da Vinci applied to his apprentices wouldn’t work for modern art enthusiasts and soon began developing paint by number kits.

Not long after paint by number was developed and marketed, kits began to sell in droves as Americans became addicted to the product that enabled them to make beautiful, intricate paintings. Robbins created even more kits and trained paint by number designers (Adam Grant was one such designer). Today, Dan Robbins’ art “has been displayed on more walls than that of any other artist.” To say that paint by number kits made Dan Robbins a success is an understatement.

Paint by number has been supplying art enthusiasts with art “blueprints,” so to speak, for decades. As a result, thousands of individuals having dormant artistic skills have blossomed into artists. This has made paint by number somewhat of an American legend, and has afforded many individuals cherished memories and increased artistic ability.

How much do you enjoy paint by number and Segmation? Whether you love crafting perfect paintings, creating great digital art, or have fond childhood memories of coloring inside the lines, your experience is unique. We want to hear your story in the comment section below. What does paint by number mean to you?

Sources:

http://www.paintbynumbermuseum.com/dan_robbins_intro

Coming Soon: Read Segmation’s exclusive article about William L. Bird, a historian and curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, where in 2001 he organized an exhibition on paint by numbers on which his book is based.

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