Posts Tagged ‘paint’

Glowing Play Pumpkin

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

This is a mashup of a felt board dress up pumpkin and a decoupaged candle holder. With it you can have a different pumpkin friend every evening, or experiment to find your favorite pumpkin face for carving!

We made two, one is a round plastic cookie tub, the other is a glass peanut butter jar.

What you need to do this:
* Clear container
* LED candle
* One 1″ square of stick on velcro (just the sharp half)
* Black felt
* Orange acrylic paint (tempera might work)
OR
* glue and orange tissue paper

Cut up the black felt into lots and lots of pumpkin eyes, noses and mouths. Size them to fit comfortably on your container.

The peanut butter jar we painted inside with watered down orange acrylic paint. Once it was dry I took the prickly half of a stick on velcro square, cut it into 5 pieces and stuck them about where I thought the face features should go.

The cookie container we decoupaged on the inside, using watered down school glue and 1″-ish squares of yellow and orange tissue paper. Rebecca worked on the lid, and Penelope helped me with the main container. She loves mashing a paint brush around! We added a little bit of Crayola Glitter It! Tempera Mixing Medium, (which is basically just glitter glue), to the watery glue to make our pumpkin glittery, because glittery is better. :-P

For this ‘pumpkin’ I just cut the velcro square up into 4 pieces. Both layouts worked.

We decoupaged the inside of the container, but if you are using a real candle (and hopefully a glass container) you should decoupage the outside so that the glue and paper don’t catch on fire! We used an LED candle so that I didn’t have to worry about the girls tipping it over when they were playing with the felt shapes, and of course, I wouldn’t put a real candle in a closed plastic container!

Put your LED candle into the container, and Play! And then of course, cut out more faces. Keep extra felt and scissors next to your pumpkin, because you never know what sort of shape you will need next!

Painting on Wood

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

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!

Squeezing Paint

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

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!

Cassette Tape Art

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

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.

Fizzy Painting

Friday, June 18th, 2010

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!

Bubble Painting

Monday, June 7th, 2010

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.