Burning Daylight: Painting Projects for Children
I sent my kids to preschool for one big reason: so I wouldn’t have to deal with painting at my house. I brought them up to believe paints existed only at school because I’m not good with mess, chaos or stains. But it’s summer now and desperate times call for desperate measures. This week in the Burning Daylight series we’re going to paint at home. And I am going to keep my head on and not act like that annoying overbearing mother who can’t stand messes and feels the need to direct her children’s artistic expressions.
The first thing we’re going to paint is the basement floor. Weeee! Kids isn’t this fun? We’re going to use just one color, gray! No, no, no….we’re going to use a few techniques for our painting this week collected from a few places around the internet.
Scrumdilly-do! Is a site I’ve been watching for a few months, collecting her fabulous ideas in different folders, this week we’ll be using quite a few of her projects to explore paint starting with this Fireworks painting idea. Of course we’re past prime firework season so this project will be more like Rorschach Painting.
Next up is a project I remember doing as a kid and loving, Art Through A Straw. This project will incorporate paint, straws and glitter, this is the formula for heaven to the under six set. We may also throw this butterfly coffee filter project at Two Straight Lines into the mix to use some watercolors as well.
My house is currently listed for sale, I’m not sure I’ve mentioned that, so it’s important we don’t create more clutter in our house. In fact, I’m currently paying $160 a month to store our clutter in a nice warehouse. Which is why I love Scrumdilly-Do’s ideas for repurposed artwork.
We’ll be making some of our paintings into envelopes using this tutorial and a regular envelope as a template. This may end up being a more ‘Mom Centric’ project because the cutting and tracing may send my 6-year-old reeling into a tantrum. But maybe my 8 year old will be able to handle it. In any event, they’ll both be happy to use the envelopes.
To use more of our paintings, we’ll be taking this repurpose idea using contact paper, string and a hole punch to create a container. Looks like daddy’s getting a new pen holder for the office. I think we’ll also create a few bookmarks because my daughter has a bookmark addiction and I’m not buying anymore.
It’s supposed to rain most of today so we’ll do our painting in the kitchen, while wrapped in plastic wrap to protect us from messes. I’m kidding! We’ll just wear rain ponchos. Again, kidding! Tomorrow we’ll work on the repurposing part of the project and we’ll report back with pictures on Thursday. I predict we’ll burn about 5 hours of daylight with this project, not including clean up time.
