Blowing Watercolors

I had so much fun with this project, I really like thing where the input is simple, but the output is chaotic and beautiful. Because, you know, that way I can be amazing without actually working hard to acquire skill. Although in this particular case, I apparently possess the skill of blowing really hard. No, that can’t be it, because I am not the person to come to when you need a balloon blown up. Maybe I am the low pressure high volume person? Recently discovered to be an important qualification when selecting shop vacs for dust collection systems. What is she talking about.

The basic idea as you’ve probably gathered is to somehow drip watercolors onto paper and then blow them around with a straw. I’ve seen this lots of places, it’s probably a project as old as preschool teachers. Sometimes I’ve seen that you should poke holes in the ends of the straw with a pin so that your kids don’t suck the paint up. You can also use food colors instead of watercolors. And you can drip them any number of ways. I put the watercolors into an ice cube tray, and I was going to use spoons to get it out, but in the end the easiest thing to do turned out to be putting the straw into the watercolor, closing the end off with your finger and then letting it out over your paper.

You do have to be able to blow pretty hard though. We used regular sized drinking straws, and not everybody could get out a good blow. You need to keep the end of the straw very close to the paint, and blow quite hard. Then you can turn the paper and blow perpendicular to the drips to get smaller drips, and so on. The teeny ones are my favorite.

I was wondering if those little coffee stirrers might work even better, but then they might not have sufficient air flow to move the paint? Anyway, I had a fabulous time, the girls eventually devolved to painting with straws, although almost all of them did at least one fabulous blown watercolor painting.