Category: Friday Fun with Art Series

In our house, we do a lot of abstract-type art… more just art to be creating art instead of a “craft” with a specific end-product in mind.  Today’s activity is sort of in between the two – because I had a definite picture in my mind of how it would look in the end… so my own paintings conformed to that set “craft” end product.  And Becca’s?  Well, thankfully I didn’t share my end product vision with her.  Because that would have spoiled her fun, and her learning experience.

With St. Patty’s day coming up soon, we decided to welcome in the month by stamping shamrocks on paper… using bell peppers.  I had carefully selected both a four and a three chamber bell pepper at the store so that we’d have three and four leaf clovers.  We pulled up Google images and looked at shamrock pictures and then dove in.  She ended up mainly creating “bushes” and “trees” – and of course, painting her hands.  (What use is finger paint if you don’t paint all of your fingers?  I mean, that’s what it means to call it finger paint, right?  HA!)

So – whether you are planning (and end up actually creating) a great shamrock printed paper to turn into greeting cards, or perhaps to use as a background for your March page in your 2016 calendar, this is a super fun activity that only involves a little bit of preparation (add two bell peppers to your grocery trip… at $.50 a piece, it’s a pretty cheap activity, too!) and you and your kids are guaranteed to have some more… Fun with Art. 🙂

Typically on Fridays, I try to share ideas that you could add to your 2016 Calendar… but this one is a little off topic… yet still right in line with keeping the ART in STEAM… so… we made our own Foot Book!  As you know from Wednesday’s post, Becca LOVES The Foot Book (Aff link, thank you!)  So I thought we’d have a little fun and make our own.

I grabbed some old shoes that we couldn’t do anything with anyway, and we did some paint stamping.  But, we also stamped with our actual feet, and had fun (LOTS OF GIGGLES!) running to the tub (after having painted in our skivvies) and hopping in to wash all the paint off.  WORD TO THE WISE:  Tempera pant washes off tile super easily… the grout, well… the grout is still blue.  (Insert super embarrassed Mommy face here, and a not-so-thrilled Daddy face… sigh.  Please learn from my mistake and use washable finger paints… and still, be careful of the grout.)

Anyway, after all of our art was dry, I taped the pages together with the Washi tape of her choosing, and then she helped me pick what words to put on which page.  We didn’t make enough art to do a page for the entire Seuss book – we just picked our favorite pages.  Definitely had a blast making it, and she loves reading back through it and giggling all over again about running to the tub with Mommy to wash off our blue and yellow feet.  Good times.  (Even if I do still need to make a baking soda paste and see if I can scrub the grout with a toothbrush….)

 

Well, once again, the link that I had to credit this idea to has disappeared from my Safari tabs, and Googling has not produced the blog post that I originally saw.  So, as with most things, please know that I’m not the original genius who thought this up… I’m just the Mommy who made it happen in our home and is now sharing with you so you can try it too!!

Bubble painting is super simple and fun – just add food coloring to bubble solution, and blow bubbles onto your paper!  The bigger the bubble, and the longer it sits before it pops, the better the marks will be.  Also, we learned that the yellow dries pretty lightly, but the blue turned out good.  So, definitely use white or creme cardstock, and when you add your food coloring in, you might want to make darker colors like purple or green.  Becca had great fun just spreading the soap solution with the bubble wands, too – there’s just no limit to the fun that can be had with this!  You could even try one of those bubble blowers that makes lots of bubbles in one cluster, and see how those painted.  There’s just a never ending list of fun things to try when painting with bubbles!  I’d love to have you try this with your kids at home, and then share your photos with me!  We’ll definitely be doing this activity again and again.

Can easily be done indoors with activity trays, or outside if it’s a nice sunny day!

Just think how awesome these are going to look added to your collages for your 2016 calendar!

I’d love to have you follow my Facebook page, where I share fun ideas from lots of bloggers, as well as run a special series each day at noon where I share favorite books to help build your home or classroom library.  Please note that the way Facebook selects pages to view on your timeline is based on your interaction with that page.  Be sure to click on over to my page frequently to see what Facebook might not be showing you, and click “like”, “comment”, and “share” on my posts to ensure that Facebook will show you what’s going on on the page!  The more you interact, the more that should show up on your news feed!  www.facebook.com/butterbeesandbumbleflies 

In continuing my Fridays of Fun with Art this year, here’s another fabulous way to make several sheets of art to use in your 2016 Calendar!  You can do this with any color, though I think it’s best including white.  We were able to talk about how the blue stayed blue, but it got lighter by adding the white.  This would be a fabulous activity for Valentine’s Day coming up using red and white to make pink!

As an educator, I totally see the purpose behind “process not product” artwork – it’s more important for the children to experience the art than to worry about what it ends up looking like.  However, that is a fairly new concept for me… so when I have an idea in my head that we’re going to use these really neat scrapers that Cody got for us, then I kinda think that’s how it should be.  Well…. the invitation was there. And I had great fun scraping on my paper.  (Didn’t it turn out AWESOME!?!)

Becca scraped some, but I didn’t think about this simple fact – her fine motor skills are such that holding a scraping square might be too challenging to be considered “Fun with Art”… so she went off on her own tangent and ended up painting her hand, and then painting on the paper.  I rolled with it, and I’m so glad that I did, because we really had a LOT of fun making these pages together.

In the end, we have some BEAUTIFUL art sheets that are going to go fabulously in our 2016 Calendar collages.  I’m so excited to try more painting with her – experimenting with colors and textures, and just seeing where she decides to take my next invitation. 🙂

Just an idea of what I’ve started doing – she does two sheets totally on her own, I do two sheets totally on my own, and then we do one sheet together.  So our sheet together was the black one and we ended up making fingerprint snowflakes all over it!  I think that will probably be the background for our January 2016 collage. 🙂