Making Paint with Spices and Berries

Summer is flying by us and it is hard to believe we did this project two weeks ago!

The children were set up with an invitation to make paints using turmeric, mulberries, tea and coffee. 

Before our art time fun began, some of the children helped collect the berries for our fun.

We first started by picking the berries, but many were too high, so in the end I shook the limbs of the tree and the berries rained down on the children.

Since we were not eating the berries, we had no problem gathering them from the ground to fill our container.

While the children played a little inside I set up little containers with the berries, tea, turmeric, and coffee.  I also set out some test tubes, funnels, a strainer, pipettes, and paint trays.

We first passed around the different items to see if the children could guess what was in each container.

This little guy was excited to let everyone know that it was coffee he was smelling

The one item that stumped everyone was the raspberry tea, but they enjoyed smelling and working with that one the best.

The children filled their test tubes with the items they wanted then added water and mixed them around to make a type of watercolor paint.

The berries they had to smash down in the tube with the pipette to get the colors release.  

After they made their watercolors they strained their concoctions into their paint trays. 

They actually made some wonderful colors that the children later painted with on watercolor envelops.

Being Blown Away

Last week and this week we spent some time exploring art making with straws.

Our first project was bubble painting and our second was creating paintings by blowing paint across the page.  I purchased The Artful Parent this month, a wonderful compilation of children's art projects by Jean Van't Hul, and these projects came from her wonderful book.


Here is a Link to the book through Roost Books: The Artful Parent

Before we began, I had the children play around with blowing air at each other through the straws.
In addition to this being just plain old fun for the kids, I was also nervous about them sucking up the bubble solution so I thought it was a good way to practice.  Jean wrote to put a little hole near the top of the straw, this helps with them not being able to suck in the solution, but there is still the chance, so I thought a little playful practice would help.

The invitation was set up when they came into "Art Time."

We have been continuing to work on our color mixing project, so this was an exciting 

new way to mix colors and see those colors bubble over.

They each had a spoon and told me which colors they wanted to mix in, and then the fun began!

 

I love these magical plates of bubble.  Our trays have a nice little lip, so I had the children prop their bubble plates up on them to help make a larger reservoir to blow their bubbles in. 

How he managed to get just one large bubble amazed both of us!

They kept their papers near by to "catch" their bubbles.  It was great fun and I like the results.

Air Blown Painting
My older kid's had so much fun playing with the straws during Art Time, that I thought the younger ones would enjoy doing a project with them as well.




I set this group up with their trays, card stock, and straws.  Again they played around with blowing air at each other.  Then one color at a time, I poured a little on their trays and they began blowing the paint around, it looked like the paint was crawling across the paper.




For this project you need to water down the paint a little.  I made a point to water down some colors more then others because I felt it would help the colors blend easier.  I also recommend using white.  Their is something about watered down white paint that lends itself beautifully to projects in which you are trying to get the colors to blend, but not become a muddied mix of color.  I found it worked wonderfully for this project, but also marbling and spin art.






The end results were very beautiful and looked a lot like marbled paper.
After the children tired of blowing the paint, many took the straws and painted with them, which
of course I loved watching, for me this is the part I love the best, the surprises that emerge spontaneously when they are working with art materials.

 

 

Marble Painting

I have been wanting to do marble painting for a long time, but for some reason I have never gotten around to doing it with the children until last week.  I was inspired by the way Jean Van't Hul documented the project in her book, The Artful Parent, and wanted to have my 2 1/2-3 year olds give it a try.

What I liked about The Artful Parents project was the use of muffin tins to roll the marbles around in.  Brilliant!  Such an easy way to control the mess and I have these wonderful trays that kept the marbles contained, so we were golden and the children loved it. 

They first rolled the marbles around in the paint with a spoon.

Dropped them on their paper...

Then slowly moved the tray around and started the marble painting process.

It is a great hand-eye coordination project because they have to be sure not to move the tray too fast or the marbles would "jump" out of the tray.

I really like the way the paintings turned out.

I also had my 3 and 4 year olds make their own, and both age groups loved it.

Another aspect of this project that some of the children enjoyed was to just use their hands to paint with the marble, which created a nice scribbling technique with the paint.