Tutorial: Liquid Watercolor Spray Paint

You'll need:

• liquid watercolors
• teeny-tiny travel-sized spritz bottles
• masking tape and biiiiiiiiig paper
• a day suitable for outdoor play

Pour liquid watercolors straight into your teeny-tiny travel-sized spritz bottles:

I know that some people water down their liquid watercolors, but I don't--I love those super-saturated colors that the straight watercolors will give you, and even undiluted, a bottle of liquid watercolor lasts approximately forever.

If you have an easel big enough to hold big paper, go ahead and mount your paper there. Otherwise, use masking tape to tape it at the top and bottom to a fence or a tree trunk or, if it's started raining all of a sudden, to the inside porch railing. 

All that's left to do after that is to spray paint!

This is an excellent activity for strengthening your kiddo's hands, by the way--pre-writing skill-building!

I love how the colors combine--so much more interesting than conventional spray paint, which I also let my babies use:

Masking tape is also a really kid-friendly material, easy for them to peel and tear off and stick, so it's fun to encourage the kiddo to make some custom masking tape reverse stencils: 

--which you can then spray paint around:

When you're finished, peel off the masking tape--

--and pose with your masterpiece!

It's a star and the earth and outer space, says Syd.

We used:

Modeling Marzipan (with the Kids!)

I originally bought a package of marzipan back before Willow's ocean party, thinking that I would use it to model some edible decorations for her birthday cake.

That did not happen (I may have taken a nap instead), but in the process of moving everything from the kitchen cabinets to some temporary shelves in the living room (who has two thumbs and is getting her kitchen re-done?), Willow discovered this package of marzipan, read the label, discovered how AWESOME the whole thing sounded, and asked to do it.

The whole process of marzipan modeling is actually really easy, and very satisfying and kid-friendly, since marzipan takes dye like a champion and it's super-soft to mold but holds its form perfectly. I first cut the log of marzipan into about eight pieces, and I let Willow choose a color for each. Definitely go with professional-quality gel dye here--I've not tried liquid food coloring on marzipan, but I've heard that it can mess with the marzipan's consistency.

Then you have to knead the dye into the marzipan, just like kneading clay:

This is an excellent exercise in patience and fastidiousness, by the way. Will can get a little...wild, shall we say, with food crafting, especially, but it's very important to go wash your hands well between each color, so that you don't contaminate the next color that you use, and I was pleased to see how conscientiously she did that, without even having to be reminded, for the most part.

Aren't they just gorgeous? The colors are perfect!

Now you can begin to create whatever you want with your marzipan. I explained to the girls that marzipan is more like FIMO than play dough--they're used to crafting giant sculptures with play dough, of which I have an unlimited supply, and small sculptures with FIMO, of which I usually only have a small amount, so this prepared them for the size of sculptures that would work best with what we had.

Other than that prep work, I just stood by and watched, amazed, as they had a fabulous time creating:

The girls did a wonderful job avoiding cross-contamination by not touching anything other than the marzipan as they worked, and washing their hands often, so I was perfectly fine with the inevitable ultimate fate of all those gorgeous, elaborate, colorful, beloved marzipan creations:

And that was their morning snack!

We used:

Tutorial: School Glue in Many Homemade Hues

You will be unsurprised to learn that we go through a LOT of glue around here. I try to buy the kids' glue only during back-to-school sales, when they're vastly cheaper than at other times, and I probably shop the back-to-school sales flyers even more avidly than the most penny-pinching parent of an institutionally-schooled kid, because whereas that parent might purchase one six-pack of Elmer's glue sticks for a dollar, I purchase ten of them.

The glue sticks give me agonies because of their plastic waste, but I still stock up because they're the best glue for all the daily little paper projects that the girls do, and they WILL go through 60 glue sticks in 12 months, I heartily assure you. I did better with the bottles of white school glue that I bought last year--I bought a dozen or so bottles (at a quarter apiece!) AND a gallon of Elmer's at the local office supply store. I took care of the small bottles, refilled them from the gallon jug as needed (as well as pulling from the gallon jug when I need glue for projects like gak and shaving cream puff paint), and did not need to purchase any new ones this year.

I over-purchased on the bottles last year (honestly, I DO know that even two children cannot each use six bottles of glue at the same time, three per hand) because I wasn't sure how durable they'd be for frequent refilling--those orange caps do break--but now that I've still got them, it's been in the back of my mind to do something fun with the extra bottles, to get them out of the glue bin and into the art rotation. I was thinking glitter glue, or perhaps tempera paint thickened with a little cornstarch, but finding this black glue and watercolor resist tutorial on the Pink and Green Mama blog was like some kind of personal jackpot for me.

I set out ten or so bottles of Elmer's glue--

--and let Syd pick out whatever colors she wanted from our collection of acrylic paints, then unscrew the cap of each bottle and squirt a couple of big squirts of one color into each bottle:

With that done, we reverted back to the black glue tutorial by shakeshakeshaking each glue bottle to mix the paint and glue together, then getting out the Strathmore watercolor paper to play with it all:

The watercolor paper is a nice choice because after the glue dries you can then add watercolors to your art, of course--

--although Syd found markers and colored pencils just as fun to work with on top of the glue.

My favorite part of this dyed glue is that it dries puffy, like the shaving cream + glue puff paint that the girls and I create sometimes, but unlike the shaving cream puff paint, this glue paint can live happily in its glue bottle on the girls' art shelves, to be taken down anytime they desire to make a little more art.

P.S. Do you love messy kid crafts? You might love my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tutorial: Shaving Cream Puff Paint

Because obviously we need yet another art supply!

To make shaving cream puff paint, mix together equal parts shaving cream--

--and white glue:

Whip it together quite quickly, so that the shaving cream doesn't lose its fluff.

Next, whip in an amount of powdered tempera to your liking:

Just a small amount gets the whole cup of paint quite gorgeous and cheerful:

Oh, and it makes a huge mess. Mental note to hose it all off later:

Prepare all your colors in separate cups--

--and then have at it!

It's a little hard to tell in a photograph how dimensional the paint is, but you can tell, at least, that the cloud blobs in Sydney's painting will dry just as cloudy and blobby as she made them, even if you can't see the waves and turns in her sky:

This paint does not keep, so when you're done painting you have the pleasure of dumping all the paint colors out onto a giant newsprint and playing at marbling them for a while:

What with starting up the summer garden and prepping for next week's International Fair (not to mention next weekend's first craft fair of the season!) and experimenting with getting the girls into the habit of doing a goodly amount of chores every day, it seems as if we've been doing an awful lot of work stuff this past week, so it felt good just to dig in and play for a while. Once the chores are habit and the big events are past (although they do just keep popping up, don't they?), I'm confident that our routine will settle itself into an easier ebb and flow of work and play.

And shaving cream puff paint. Can't leave that off the schedule.

Messy Monkey

I'm starting a new web shop in my pumpkinbear shop at etsy. The girls and I love to make art supplies and I then like to make natural cleaning supplies to clean up after their use of said art supplies--thus, a web shop. Here's what I've got so far:

They're little one-ounce vegetable glycerin soaps with esential oils added in--I nerded out in my product listing, listing each of the essential oils from which a patron can choose, along with its therapeutic benefits and a description of its scent. Stuff like that is important to know, though, because peppermint soap really does make you feel better when you're nauseated, and eucalyptus soap really does clear out your congestion when you have a cold. The photos are all a little grumpy because it's been raining here for days and our house basically gets no natural light, so I might replace them when the sun shines again and I can make everything look cute out on the grass.

Stuff in the future Messy Monkey shop: two more sizes of heart soaps with essential oils, soap crayons (still in the r&d phase--I tried out a recipe yesterday that left my hands indelibly stained in purple), scented baby powder, recycled and remelted crayons, and kits for making your own art supplies and art projects with the kiddos. Any requests?