Crafty Kit Review: Decorative Tile Art

Late summer days are the perfect days for making stuff outside, I think. One of my favorite things about our house is our backyard deck, shaded by a giant maple, with plenty of room to fit a nice, big table and still sprawl about the deck chairs and admire the couple of potted plants that the chickens haven't destroyed.

It was, happily, another lovely late summer day when the kids and I spent our art time playing with this kit sent to us by a publicist for review:

Decorative Tile Art has a book of instructions for doing cool stuff to ceramic tiles using permanent markers and rubbing alcohol. Along with the instructions, you get some tiles, markers, coaster pads, a brush and an eye dropper, and glaze. I added the rest of our Sharpies, even more ceramic tiles from my garage stash, and, just for fun and experimentation, some rocks leftover from Syd's rock painting project, and some small mirrors to also draw on:

The instruction book teaches you ways to draw on the tiles, and other ways to add rubbing alcohol for interesting effects:

Will got her tile quite saturated with different colors--

--and then ended up trying out a few different techniques. We really liked the results!

Syd liked the look of this tile when she misted on rubbing alcohol, then blotted it off with a tissue:

I am always a fan of process-oriented art, and I loved the fact that you don't exactly know what's going to happen when you add the rubbing alcohol to your tile. This is what it looks like when I drew circles in different colors and then used an eye dropper to drip rubbing alcohol onto them. Weird and cool, right?



Syd tried the same thing:

But it looks like she might have felt a little differently about her own unexpected results...

Will and I kept moving through materials and techniques, interested in seeing all that we could do with markers and rubbing alcohol:

Syd, though, when she got a tile that she really liked, cleverly used the abstract design as the background to a whole new illustration:

Look how lovely it turned out!

You can do anything with these tiles that you'd do with a regular tile, although you want to seal them, of course, if you're going to subject them to any wear and tear. I sealed our tiles very well, because they're our new coasters!

I received a free copy of Decorative Tile Art, because I can't review a kit unless I've used it to spend an afternoon outside, coloring happily and chasing the chickens away from the rubbing alcohol!