Sometimes you just need a different canvas.

Step 1: Scrounge around on trash day, someone will have tree trimmings out to be collected. Free is good.
Step 2: Slice. We used our handy dandy bandsaw, but a hand saw would work fine.
Step 3: Paint. We didn’t do any sanding, it’s all about the process! Besides, the wavy saw marks gave it some interesting texture.

The girls also used these for stamping on their paper, monoprints (or tri-prints) of painted wood. The texture and irregular shape made these fun printing blocks.

Once you are done decorating them you can add them to your block collection too! Or they can be doors for hobbit-fairy houses. There are so many things you can do with flat rounds of wood!

If you put out squeeze bottles of paint, for filling up trays, or for using for painting, it seems that inevitably they are squeezed and squeezed and squeezed into a giant puddle until they are empty. So sometimes when that seems to be happening quite a lot, we make up paint just for squeezing. Mostly flour and water, with some paint for color, it is very cheap, somewhat thick, and very satisfying to squeeze out of old food containers like this old honey bear.

One of the benefits of accidentally buying student tempera instead of washable tempera is that there is so much pigment in them that a tiny bit was enough to dye the flour paint quite brightly. I was actually trying to make pink as one of our colors, so I added just a little red, but I got red. I was quite surprised, as I remember trying to get red with our old washable paints and ending up with pink after what seemed like a ridiculous amount of paint. I’ve tried making the student tempera washable by cutting it 50/50 with castile soap, which sort of works, perhaps I need to go more like 10/90! And add corn starch. Or something. Anyway, squeezing paint is great fun!

[This second picture is mostly regular paint. It may be a giant puddle, but isn't it pretty? ]

Have you done this before? Have you squeezed paint onto anything other than paper before? I think there are probably some good ideas around this and I’d like to hear them!

Decluttering leads to lots of interesting art materials. This particular Friday I put out a pile of old cassettes for the girls. First they grabbed the tape and ran around the yard, around the car, around each other. Then there was a little bit of screaming and whining. After we untangled everyone and gather everything back up the girls made big crinkly birds nesty heaps and covered them with paint. Big messy process work, and I confess I threw the whole pile away when we were done.

I made this project up, but I’m sure I wasn’t the first! I gave my daughter a small glass jar with some baking soda in it, and asked her to mix in enough liquid watercolors to make a liquid. Then she painted with the baking soda paint. When she started asking me for a second jar so she could have another color I handed her a spray bottle of vinegar instead. It was fun and a bit silly.

This is also not the way to create archival works of art, and in fact, should not be stored with any other paper you want to save, since the acid in the vinegar will destroy paper over time.

The next thing we tried was making a thick paste – taking baking soda and adding just enough liquid water color until it stuck together. Then you can make little colored clumps and put them on your paper to make a fizzy colored circle. Lots of fizzing colors = fun!

Fun times. You should have seen my table when she was done. The vinegar and paint ran all the way from one end to the other. Next time… oh, hmm, you know, I don’t HAVE any cookie sheets with rims anymore… they were all non-stick and I got rid of them. I forgot that I used them for art projects too… OOPS!

It may not be obvious from first glance, but we painted with bubbles. Take some bubble blow, mix in some liquid water colors, and blow bubbles onto paper. When it works you get perfect swirly circles. When it doesn’t work you get lots of drips and bubbles in each others faces… But, hey, drip painting is fun too! We won’t talk about the bubble wars, except to note that we (almost) always use non-toxic art supplies.

Here is Penelope with her first blessing of red. The downside was that although the dye came out of her skin reasonably well, her slight cradle cap was red for a month until I got tired of people asking if she had some horrible skin condition and put some oil on her head to dissolve it. Worked amazingly well actually.

And Rebecca about half way through. I was sort of hoping her hair would stay dyed purple, but it came right out.

It was hard to pick just a few pictures, but in the end I couldn’t resist the baby foot! You can see how grubby Penelope is in the background. I love my messy girls!

The basic idea is to make a salt solution, super saturated or not, mix it in with different colors of liquid water colors, then paint. As it dries it forms different crystal patterns, the type depending somewhat on the salt concentration that you mixed in, and whether the salt was fully dissolved. Epsom salts are cool because they naturally form much larger crystals than NaCl – table salt. Don’t ask me why, I’m lousy at chemistry. But it looks really pretty!

Starting the wee one off with the painting thing. Liquid water colors and fingers. Two months ago technically, looking at the EXIF. Oooh, I’m too busy, aren’t I? Hmm. What to do. I’ll have to think about that one.

Isn’t this beautiful? I’m pretty sure the paper never really got taken out. We started stirring paint around in the pie pans that I use as pallets, and ended with it all over legs and bellybuttons. And oh. No one caught one little girl before she went inside to use the bathroom. Oh my. It is really amazing the number of things that small people bump up against and touch on their way through a bathroom. I could have saved the room as a conceptual art piece about bodies in motion, but, I didn’t.

I helped with Rebecca’s class science fair project (she goes to a co-op preschool), and we did plant dyes. It was a lot of fun, I did a live drawing story, telling a story and drawing pictures at the same time, for the motivation, which I’d never done before. Thankfully it was an easy audience! Here is my story:

One day the kids in Miss Leslie’s class went to the farmers market, looked around at all the different tents selling all kinds of different fruits and vegetable, and bought a red cabbage, carrots, onions, and beets. Then on the way home at the top of a hill someone thought it should be their turn to carry the carrots, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the onions, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the beets, and there was a little disagreement about who should be carrying the cabbage. There was a little bit of tugging, someone bumped somebody, and the whole class rolled down the hill together with the vegetables. At the bottom they picked themselves up, and being sturdy 3&4 year olds no one was hurt. But someone noticed that there was orange all over their pants, someone had a green knee, someone was brown all over, someone’s shirt had a big red splot and one kid’s face had turned purple. Well, they wondered, where did all these colors come from? So they went back to the classroom and set out to find out.

And let me tell you, a jar of cabbage juice that has been unrefrigerated for a week smells awful!

We didn’t set the dyes with anything, we just juiced the vegetables, stuffed muslin in with the juice in jars and let it sit for a few days. In addition to the vegetables we also used dirt and grass, which the kids collected. What smells worse than a jar of old cabbage juice? An art rack full of hanging strips of muslin that have been marinating in old onion skins, beet juice and cabbage juice. It was raining outside, so the rack was drying inside. I’m glad I wasn’t working in the classroom that day, when I came to pick Rebecca up, wow did the room smell. But it was all for SCIENCE! Hmm.