Ideas for a Junior Girl Scout's Drawing & Painting Badge

Search for a museum in your area that features a woman artist.

Visit the exhibit and take notes about her life and art. Determine her style and her medium.

If allowed, take pictures of her work to share with your troop. Follow up at the library or on the Internet with more exploration of the artist.

Learn if her art was accepted readily, or if she was struggled to complete her craft. Did she have success while she was still living or did it come later? How has her art encouraged you to do more?

Basic geometric shapes can often be seen in art. Look at some artwork and decide which shapes are used to represent different items. A tree may be a circle or a triangle, a building is a rectangle.

Cut some different shapes out of construction paper and use them to create pictures. Try to make a human form out of your shapes.

Then do it with different shapes and see if it still resembles a human. Glue your pieces onto a piece of paper for your presentation.

Creating an image in different colors can have a profound impact on the viewer. If you have a digital camera, do an experiment using the color settings available. Most cameras have a sepia mode that will produce photos in brown tones. These photos appear to be from another era.

Some cameras will shoot most of the image in black and white and allow you to emphasize one bright color like blue or green.

Or you may be able to make the photo look like a negative. Experiment with your camera. When you have several shots that you like, print them and explain the affect they might have on viewers.

See if there are other girls in your troop who are also working on this badge. Team up and paint a mural together.

Decide on the scene you would like to paint, or work with your troop leader to determine the drawing.

Maybe you'd like to create an image of an outing the troop took together.

Perhaps your troop is doing some charity work and you can make a mural for a children's hospital or a senior citizen's facility. Use different media to complete the mural.

For an artistic experiment, create three pieces of art using different media such as paint, chalk, crayons, charcoal, markers or pastels.

Surprise your troop leader by creating portraits of her using these three separate media.

Does a painted picture look different than one made with charcoal?

Is one type of medium easier to use than another?

Which one was your favorite to work with? Describe your results in your presentation.

Learn about the primary colors, which are the basis for all colors, and secondary colors.

Get a spiral-bound book and create pages that show how these colors look when you mix them to create new colors. Use watercolors for the best results. Research color harmonies to learn about complementary, analogous and triad color schemes. Look in an art book or on the Internet for works of art that show these colors used together. Ask at a hardware store if you can have a few color chips for a Girl Scout color project. Using specific color chips allows you to display primary and secondary colors and color harmonies so that others can understand the concept.