This was fun. Why paint one cardboard box when you can paint about 15 of them all riveted together with makedo? This fortress should have been more spectacular, but it and our entire cardboard stash was rained on the day before. Sad! Shoring up a damp wilted cardboard fortress with more soft cardboard doesn’t work so well. But it did help. The broom holding up the center helped more. Embarrassing, but practical.

The girls really did love it. I put out tempera paint in pie pans, then water color spray bottles, and paper + masking tape. They painted and argued and painted, and worked on learning to spray paint their names. I felt like I was educating the next generation of taggers. One day cardboard buildings & spray bottles, the next underpasses and spray paint.

What did you do with all of your holiday cardboard?

One of the projects we did for my textiles class was stamping on canvas bags. Before that class I made this example piece of stamping a leaf and custom sponge stamp. Stamping with leaves is so much fun! I put a bit of acrylic paint into a baking tin, brushed it think with a brush, then rubbed the leaf in it. That kept the paint mainly on the leaves’ rib and veins which let me get a good print. I didn’t even have to use a brayer, I just pressed down evenly with my fingers. I was surprised that it worked as well as it did with as little fuss.

One of the other things I tested for my class is cutting sponge stamps, but I wanted something light enough that little hands with little scissors could cut it. I found these lightweight sponge-cloths, and they worked pretty well. They are about 3/16″ thick and pre-moisened, so they are soft. They are a little fiddly to stamp with, because they are thin, but they are nice to cut stamps out of and worked fine with just a smear of paint on my tray. After stamping the tree branches I went back later and drybrushed in the foliage.

Here are some of the kid’s bags, in addition to leaves and sponges they had pre-cut potato stamps, lemon and apple halves, pine cones and other fall detritus, and of course, their hands.

I’ve seen Snap Painting a couple of places, one was on Teacher Tom’s blog (which is awesome, I totally need to redo my sidebar, it’s about a year out of date at least, sorry awesome bloggy friends!)

We used Teacher Tom’s idea about using popsicle sticks, but we made ours in square frames, and wrapped a rubber band around so that it went in a triangle along the frame and across the middle. Then paint the rubber band and SNAP with your fingers! (Rebecca is holding the frame right against the paper in the above picture, but it works better if you hold it a couple inches over the paper so the paint has room to fly out. It makes the most interesting squiggly trails of paint! Very messy, there’s a lot of back-snap, the paint doesn’t all go forward! But at least the kids we have obeyed the injunction not to chase each other around snapping paint… YMMV!

Woo pendulum painting! I saw this idea in Disney Family Fun Magazine, and also in Teacher Tom’s blog. Disney had you hang the pendulum from a tree, Teacher Tom had built a pvc table frame.

I didn’t have paper big enough for a tree-hung-pendulum, and if I had used one I know a few young ladies that would have swung the pendulum over their heads spraying paint all over the visible scene. I also didn’t have enough PVC to build a dedicated frame, but I did have several 5′ lengths that I’d just bought for our air rocket project. (Yes, there will be pictures of that next Friday.)

So I used my mad lashing skills to make a tripod. We should all get to use our mad lashing skills more often, I am pretty sure.

Our pendulum we made out of an 8oz paint bottle with a glue bottle type nozzle. My original thinking was that we would be able to control the flow, but it only barely worked full open. It did make it easy to close it to fill with paint though.

For the paint I just used tempera paint cut 50/50 with water. I kept adding water until it would freely drain through the glue bottle cap. Sometimes I didn’t add enough and it would make a drippy spotty line, but that’s fun too.

We all had fun! There was ‘proper’ painting by letting the pendulum swing, and also quite a lot of just holding the string and wagging the pendulum around, in addition to some ‘moving the paper’ techniques employed by our youngest artist.

If I was going to do it again I would mix up a big pitcher of a single color (or maybe two) and precut the paper, because I felt like set up was a big bottle neck to our creative exploration. Also, bigger paper.

Or, you know, we could go totally hard core like this artist, Tom Shannon, and build a radio controlled solenoid driven six color mixing monster pendulum. But we probably won’t. At least not this year.

This is the perfect messy activity for a hot summer day, painting with ice! And it is easy too.

I’ve used watered down tempera paint before, and food coloring and water, but this time we used diluted (washable) liquid watercolors, and I think I like that the best. It doesn’t stain like the food coloring, and when you freeze the tempera paint it works, but it separates out the water and pigment and the texture of the ice is sort of odd.

Whatever your paint though, just put it in an ice cube tray the night before, and break it out when you need something cold to play with. (Please use a dedicated art ice cube tray unless you are using food colors, art materials and food just don’t mix.)

Sometimes I add handles with popsicle sticks, (say if it is winter and we are painting inside…) but this time I really wanted them to play with the tactile coldness of the ice, since it was a nice hot day.

You can rub your melty ice cubes all over the paper, or just shake them in your hands to make a fun drip painting!

First we mixed up three different batches of fizzy paint:
Washable tempera paint with baking soda,
Washable liquid watercolors with baking soda and corn starch,
Washable liquid watercolors with baking soda, corn starch and bubble formula.

Pair this alkaline paint with a spray bottle of vinegar and you have a very fizzy driveway! Woo, spray bottles!

Disappointingly for my experiment but yay for you, all of the formulations pretty much worked the same, and I can’t say the proportions matter all that much, I used roughly 1:1, adding in the baking soda until I didn’t think it would stay paint if I added any more. I hypothesized that adding bubbles to the mix would result in bigger more long lasting fizzy bubbles, but it didn’t seem to have an effect, I’m guessing it was too dilute. Next time I will try dish soap.

In any case, the girls were crazy about this, so my ‘research’ has shown that you can take whatever paint you happen to have, mix in a bunch of baking soda, and hand it out along with a spray bottle of vinegar and the result will be lots of squeals, running around, and a very messy driveway!

Happy Friday!

Holi is a Hindu festival of spring. Spring. It isn’t remotely spring anymore, but I was just looking through my photos for something else, and aren’t these beautiful? I love Holi. This year I was brave/foolish enough to take my good camera, and although my camera survived it needed a good cleaning, and my camera case was an entirely different matter. Well, it did survive, but I think I spent over an hour trying to get the red powder out of its many cracks and seams. I seem to remember eventually resorting to the hose… So I don’t know what it was I was doing in April that was so important, but obviously what I *should* have been doing was sharing these!

Now go make a mess!

Doesn’t Rebecca look like a model here? Ignoring the chocolate stains around her mouth? Because, frankly, my children are very rarely clean.

This flower is made by ripping the cup off a paper egg carton (it started as a mottled grey-ish color), shoving a pipe cleaner through the middle (sometimes with a button), and then spray painting it with liquid water colors.

Here you can see a button, and the edges of this flower were cut to be more flower like.

Don’t you want to eat up these baby fingers? They are working so hard to squeeze that spray bottle.

These flowers were inspired by these flowers via The Crafty Crow

Step 1: Find a box or deep tray to hold your paper. If you happen to be lucky enough to get a K3 size box from amazon it is almost the perfect size for 12×18″ paper, a little small in the long direction, but that just curls up the very edge of the paper. Awesome. Rebecca filled them with water a couple days before our playgroup so they warped. Not so awesome. They still worked, but after that they were a little bit humpy and it made it a little harder to roll the marbles around. Now we need to figure out what we can order from Amazon to get more K3 boxes. Okay okay, no.

Step 2: Get marbles painty and dump them in your box. We did this two different ways. When there were fewer kids and I wasn’t worried about them just squirting all the paint in their box, we dumped all the marbles into a corner and squirted a little paint over them. This lets you get a light coat of paint on your marbles and they still roll around really easily, but there is enough paint on the paper to make great tracks.

The second way was to dump the marbles into a small container with a layer of paint, and shake them around until they are coated, then dump the painty marbles into the paper box. When we did it this way the marbles tended to start out really goopy and slide around rather than rolling until they had lost some of the extra paint. It still worked fine, but it wasn’t as tactile-y satisfying. It might have worked better if there was barely any paint in the container. It did successfully kept the kids from squeezing all the paint into their tray.

Of the two methods, squirting a little paint onto the marbles (or just somewhere on the paper) while they were in the paper tray made rolling the marbles around more satisfying for me.

Step 3: Roll the marbles around.

Step 4: Repeat with another color.

Step 5: Admire your awesome art piece. I know, I know, it’s all about the process, but these come out really pretty, especially if you layer lots of colors. I don’t actually have pictures of my favorites, which layered clear glitter gel colors and black.

This activity was also excellent for getting a little boy who steadfastly resists our usual art projects really involved, which was an awesome bonus.

We were at a yard sale, and we saw these 6″ paint brushes for 50c. So we bought two, and brought them home to paint. Good thing we have a supply of old pie-pans on hand for things like potato stamping, because these paint brushes certainly wouldn’t fit into our smaller paint containers!

Rebecca had fun painting large monochromatic works, but the brushes were too big for Penelope, and I ended up trading hers for a 1.5″ flat brush we had.

It would have been fun to use these to paint on an enormous piece of butcher paper on the fence, or maybe pair it with painting with tiny brushes on tiny paper!