Three Simple Yet Fantastic Ideas for Girls' Birthday Parties

Let's face it, creating a great girls' birthday party can often seem like an uphill challenge-even for the most creative of parents. With work and other obligations weighing down on you, it is easy to feel a sense of panic as your daughter's big day creeps up. Fortunately, girls' birthday parties are far simpler than most parents think. With their friends around and a little attention, you are half way to winning the birthday party battle. Here are three ideas you can easily execute.

A Cooking Party

With the Great British Bake Off and Masterchef once again taking the BBC by storm, older girls are becoming enticed by the idea of breaking out an apron and creating something delicious. Even some younger girls may enjoy the idea of joining their parents in the kitchen. A cooking party-under the right supervision-is a fantastic way to stimulate your daughter's creative side. One of the best aspects of hosting such a party is that you do not need to worry about providing food, as that becomes the kids' job. This is also a great idea for girls who want a unisex party.

Make Over Parties

Girls of all ages love a little glitz and glam. It is for this reason that make over parties are so popular. A typical make over party involves manicures, pedicures, and make-up. Usually, two girls are seen to by beauticians at the same time, which gives the rest of the guests a chance to run around with each other and chat. This is a party that works well throughout the year. During the summertime, you can use a gazebo to create a cool outdoor area for your daughter and her friends to hang out in. In the winter, you can host the party in your front room. Want to know the best part? Mess is minimal.

Crafting Parties

Whether it is jewelry making or throwing together some Christmas cards, crafting parties are always a hit with young girls. Girls birthday parties that focus on crafting ideas are particularly exciting when you have two or three crafting stations in your home. Your daughter and her friends can make several crafts. Jewelry works well, as the guests can take their creations home with them, which prevents you from having to worry about party bags. Alternatively, you can give the crafts a theme. When the wintertime comes around, making Christmas decorations is exciting. During the summer, stringing together some flowers for Hawaiian-style garments is always fun.

The key with any party is to build-up a little excitement. This is a great chance for extended family members and friends to enjoy time together. Your daughter, like all little girls, will always appreciate the efforts that have gone in to making her big day special.

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Three Simple Yet Fantastic Ideas for Girls' Birthday Parties

Let's face it, creating a great girls' birthday party can often seem like an uphill challenge-even for the most creative of parents. With work and other obligations weighing down on you, it is easy to feel a sense of panic as your daughter's big day creeps up. Fortunately, girls' birthday parties are far simpler than most parents think. With their friends around and a little attention, you are half way to winning the birthday party battle. Here are three ideas you can easily execute.

A Cooking Party

With the Great British Bake Off and Masterchef once again taking the BBC by storm, older girls are becoming enticed by the idea of breaking out an apron and creating something delicious. Even some younger girls may enjoy the idea of joining their parents in the kitchen. A cooking party-under the right supervision-is a fantastic way to stimulate your daughter's creative side. One of the best aspects of hosting such a party is that you do not need to worry about providing food, as that becomes the kids' job. This is also a great idea for girls who want a unisex party.

Make Over Parties

Girls of all ages love a little glitz and glam. It is for this reason that make over parties are so popular. A typical make over party involves manicures, pedicures, and make-up. Usually, two girls are seen to by beauticians at the same time, which gives the rest of the guests a chance to run around with each other and chat. This is a party that works well throughout the year. During the summertime, you can use a gazebo to create a cool outdoor area for your daughter and her friends to hang out in. In the winter, you can host the party in your front room. Want to know the best part? Mess is minimal.

Crafting Parties

Whether it is jewelry making or throwing together some Christmas cards, crafting parties are always a hit with young girls. Girls birthday parties that focus on crafting ideas are particularly exciting when you have two or three crafting stations in your home. Your daughter and her friends can make several crafts. Jewelry works well, as the guests can take their creations home with them, which prevents you from having to worry about party bags. Alternatively, you can give the crafts a theme. When the wintertime comes around, making Christmas decorations is exciting. During the summer, stringing together some flowers for Hawaiian-style garments is always fun.

The key with any party is to build-up a little excitement. This is a great chance for extended family members and friends to enjoy time together. Your daughter, like all little girls, will always appreciate the efforts that have gone in to making her big day special.

View the original article here

How To Improve Your Drawing Skill With This Simple Lesson

All of us are deeply inculcated with symbolic preconceptions. When we begin to draw there is a disconnect between what we see and what we are looking at. This is not just a difference in syntax, it is the result of a system of symbols within our racial subconscious that asserts itself as soon as a pencil touches paper.

For example: a beginner's portrait drawing exhibits many of the same characteristics as that of children: The eyes are generally elliptical and the head an oval. These are symbols of eyes and the head.

Even a professional artist with many years of experience and training constantly struggles with extricating these symbolic preconceptions from their work. Often an artist will subconsciously invent their own symbols -- instead of drawing elliptical eyes they will tend to draw their own eyes.

An artist's training should begin with learning how to accurately strike the overall shape of an object. But even beginning with a simple object such as a shoe box involves a set of complex actions. First, one needs to gauge how big to draw the box relative to their drawing paper (or canvas). Second, the height to width proportion needs to be accurately established. And, third, the angles of the shoe box must be rendered correctly to convincingly convey spatial dimension.

A beginning artist's initial lessons should be to acquire the skill of accurately assessing and drawing any given rectangle. This will train you to immediately assess any subject's height/width proportion, a critical component to drawing accurately.

The Drawing Lesson

Using a water-soluble black marker, preferably one with a thick nib, approximate a large rectangle, 18 x 24 inches will suffice, on a suitable piece of paper. You can also use a toned pre-stretched canvas. Affix this onto a wall about six feet distance and at your eye level.

You will need a piece of plexiglass, about 14 x 11 inches, that is placed over your drawing paper. With your black marker quickly draw that rectangle as accurately as you can adjudge onto the plexiglass without any pre-measuring. This is important; any pre-measuring will defeat the purpose of this lesson.

From your station point (this is where you are standing at your easel) hold up the plexiglass toward the subject rectangle to assess the accuracy of your drawing. You will need to focus your plexiglass so that the top and bottom of both the subject rectangle and your drawing are aligned.

If the widths are matched you have done a commendable job. More likely, however, your drawing will be too wide. Most beginning artists tend to exaggerate the width of their subjects.

Wipe off your plexiglass and repeat the exercise with the knowledge that you likely tend to draw things too wide. This self-corrective strategy is extremely effective in improving your drawing skill.

Once you can accurately inscribe an 18 x 24 inches rectangle push yourself forward and repeat this drawing lesson with a variety of rectangles.

Whether your subject is portraiture, landscape or still-life the height/width proportion needs to be immediately established. When drawing a portrait I always begin by indicating the height of the head from crown to chin while simultaneously determining my composition. This singular drawing lesson will literally save you years of struggle and significantly propel your art making forward.

Michael Britton is a painter, teacher and writer. Trained at the Art Students' League and the New York Academy of Art, Michael has exhibited and taught extensively in his almost 30 year career. Michael was the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Vancouver Academy of Art for seven years (1997-2004).

He is the author of nine video workshops that are all available at http://www.artacademy.com/. His teaching focuses on traditional portrait drawing and painting in addition to composition and color theory.

Michael also travels and paints en plein air extensively. His comic travelogues and oil sketches are published at http://www.en-plein-air.com/.