As much as I tell parents that all you really need are the most basic of art supplies for kids' art, I have to admit that we are big fans of fun and innovative art materials. We have long loved crayon rocks and have more recently started a love affair with shaped crayons.
Besides being great for free drawing, these special crayons often inspire more imagination in my daughters' drawing and art. They even incorporate creative play aspects, lifting the entire art experience beyond the 2-dimensional drawing on paper.
Taking baths and painting are our favorite “go-to” kid’s activities.
Our latest “painting” experience combined the two! Whoohoo! We made bathtub paint. You can make it thick and use it as finger paint, or you can dilute it and use it with paintbrushes. Our bathtub "paint" is washable, does not stain and will help you clean your tub. So sit near the bathroom with a good book and let your kids have a blast! It won't be quiet, but at least you can have some mommy down time.
Have you tried yarn paintings yet? The combination of yarn, glue, and paint makes it an especially fun and tactile art activity for kids. Plus the three-dimensional aspect makes it stand apart from most kids' painting projects.
Art. Kids. Its beautiful to watch the doors to a life of creativity open for our kids!
Our toddlers are beginning their life’s adventure with creativity. Every day has something new for them to explore, manipulate and create. These are just a few of the pre-art activities that our kids have enjoyed.
I give my daughters separate paints. Not always. But when I can, I do.
Daphne and Maia are at such different stages on the paint mixing spectrum, that if I don't it just leads to frustration for both of them.
Maia, at seven, is meticulous with her paints. If her paints start out looking like the photo above, they will end looking like the photo above.* She washes her brush between paint colors or uses a different brush.
We've continued to experiment with doodled autumn leaves in combination with other fall arts and crafts ideas just because they are so fun and beautiful. These fall paintings were recently made by Maia and Daphne on canvas with paints, leaves, and metallic sharpies.
The sharpie drawings were more of an afterthought on this particular project, but such a nice one. I'm starting to think that every art project needs a little silver or gold sharpie addition...
I picked up a 2 pack of stretched canvases on sale at AC Moore recently and brought them out when the kids were asking to paint earlier this week. They enjoy painting on something more substantial and a bit more "special" than paper. I've noticed that they usually slow down and paint more deliberately when using a canvas.
And I love how the canvas paintings look hanging on the wall!
Now that Maia is 7 and Daphne is just a tad older than Maia was that first time, it's interesting to see the changes that age and development make. Whereas in the past, Maia made abstract designs with the glue, this time she mostly created more deliberate designs, words, and illustrations of real things such as faces and a tree.
We did a fun new stained glass art project after school yesterday using colored index dividers and Sharpies. Our dining room window is now filled with brightly colored modern stained glass art, sunflowers from Maia's garden, and the two melted bead stained glass pieces that never popped out of their cookie cutters (they are perfect for our window sill!).
By the way, I've decided you can pretty much count on a suncatcher or stained glass post from me about every couple of weeks. I love them that much and my kids seem to like them a lot, too (or maybe they're just humoring me...).
Little did the shaving cream manufacturers know when they first developed their product, that it would become the epitome of sensory art and sensory play for children all over.
They couldn't have known that their most ardent supporters would be young children wanting to swoosh and slide their hands through it, draw and paint in it, smooth it over their forearms (or more), and squirt it out of the canister. They wouldn't have imagined that it would be the under 6 crowd who would beg for the shaving cream to be brought down from the shelf for an art project or that it would be the most requested art material in the house.
