Art & Science Collide: Watercolor Salt Paintings

We actually created this project months ago. The girls had a no school day back in February and I kept them busy with art projects that day. One of them was watercolor salt paintings! This is a relatively easy project to do and the girls really seemed to enjoy it! It would be a short quick-drying project to do as a birthday craft as well.

What you need:
--watercolors (I like liquid watercolors, I think they are much more vibrant)
--table salt
--watercolor paper
--blue painters tape (optional)
 
Start by having the kids block off a design on the watercolor paper with the blue tape.

Here are their taped off designs:

Then just fill in a section with watercolor paint. We found being liberal with the paint/liquid worked best. After doing a small section, sprinkle a little salt on the paint and move on repeating the process in the next area.

And here are the finished wet paintings with the tape still on:

My nine year old's:

 My seven year old's:

 Here is the one I made. :-)

 And here they are with the tape removed:

 And just for fun, here's a close-up:

This was a really fun project because not only is it artistic, but scientific too! I explained to them about how salt is a dessicant and sucks up the water/liquid. They thought this was such a neat thing to see! You can see the speckling happen as it dries.

Once the projects are dry, just remove the tape, brush the salt away and enjoy your beautiful artwork!

Toddler Sensory Activity: DIY Slime!

I will admit it, during the summer, my son was in front of the television quite a bit. I have 9 and 7 year old girls and a 2 1/2 year old boy. It's tough to find art activities that will work for all three of them. We did do a few projects all together this summer, but quite a bit of the time, if I was doing something with the girls and it wasn't nap time, poor Kellan was watching a movie. Now, this wasn't all day or anything like that. But definitely more TV watching than I would like. So, now that school is back in session for my girls, I've tried to make a concerted effort to do activities that are on Kellan's level and get him away from the TV. I actually have quite a few to post about, but today's was so fun I had to jump on here and post right away!

We made SLIME! And he LOVED it!

We were inspired once again by The Chocolate Muffin Tree, and her slime exploration post. All you need is the following:
--Glue (either Elmer's white glue or Clear Glue--we used Colorations Clear glue from Discount School Supply)
--water
--bowl
--Borax
--food coloring or liquid watercolor

You mix 3/4 cup warm water and 1 cup clear glue (or elmer's glue) and coloring (we used Liquid watercolor--a few drops was all we needed). We mixed the water and glue in the green measuring cup and then poured it in the bowl mixing the color in there.

How fun is it that there are actually photos of ME doing the project with Kellan! My husband works from a home office and he happened to come up for his lunch today at the same time we were making the slime. He grabbed the camera and took a few photos of me with Kellan. :-)

Then we mixed 1 1/3 cups warm water and 4 teaspoons of Borax in a measuring cup (make sure none of the Borax is inhaled and none of the slime ingested). Then added that to the bowl with the colored glue mixture.

Once you add the Borax mixture, you see results IMMEDIATELY! The slime starts to form right away.

As soon as we had it mixed up pretty well, we took it out of the bowl and played with it on the counter. There was still quite a bit of liquid left in the bowl. I just set that aside. After playing with it for a bit on the counter, I moved him to the light table to play with it! Because we used clear glue, the slime was fabulously transparent and looked AMAZING on the light table!

After playing with it with just his hands for a bit, I got a pumpkin cookie cutter and that worked really well too! The slime is thick enough to "cut".

If I had thought of it while we were playing, I would have grabbed a few black beans for him to make a pumpkin face in the slime. The opaqueness of the beans would have looked really cool on the light table against the transparent nature of the slime! We'll definitely do that next time.

After he was done with the cookie cutter, I gave him a ziploc bowl. He squished the slime in and dumped it out. It held the shape of the bowl! You could make "sand" castles with different size and shaped molds!

After you play with the slime for a bit, it gets sort of crumbly. So we added it back to our liquid in the bowl and kneaded it a bit and it became more liquified again.

All in all this was an incredibly successful activity for my sensory seeking boy! We just put it all back in the bowl and I covered the top with saran wrap. It's sitting waiting for the girls to get home from school. I'm pretty sure my nine year old sensory seeking girl will LOVE this as well!

2012: Mommy Art Camp--Painted Peacocks

Note: I am hoping to put a PDF document together with all of our bird art camp projects in one place for anyone interested (though I'm not sure when I'll get it all done). With this in mind, I am not going to go into quite as many how-to details on these projects. But, the projects are fairly self-explanatory. :-)

This project was inspired from here, here and here.

The girls really LOVED this project, especially my 9 year old. She took her time and really got into this one. I LOVED how both of them turned out!

 

Before Ella painted her feathers she was very concerned about making sure they were exactly how she wanted them. So we worked together on a separate piece of paper. First, we figured out the color combination she wanted, then I helped teach her how the feathers might be painted. She practiced quite a bit before finally working on her painting. So fun to see your go through the artistic process!

She painted one color all the way around so that it would dry before adding the next color. This way the colors wouldn't blend together quite as much.

Here is my six year old's masterpiece:

And my nine year old's finished painting!

Aren't they both soooo gorgeous!!!! I just LOVE them!