Feeling Artistic

Lately summer has been holding on with a vice grip and I have been seriously tired of being out in the heat. That and the splash park is closed and our baby pool is now deflated and put away making the heat that much more miserable.  In order to keep from getting bored I have been trying to get a little more artistic.

Gideon is really into coloring these days.  In the mornings we like to go to www.sproutonline.com to pick out  a coloring page to print and color, Elmo is a favorite.

sometimes mama helps with the coloring

Other days I just roll out an enormous sheet of paper and let him go at it.

Giant boxes also make great palettes.

When the child does insist on going outdoors I like to bring a cup of water and some brushes for a little water painting on the sidewalk.

Or his favorite, some sidewalk chalk.

We tried out some homemade finger paints too!  I stored them tightly covered as instructed in the recipe but they turned into petri dishes anyway so maybe those are worth just buying at Walmart.

Today I half watched how they made paintings with oil and water on the Sunnyside Up Show.  I should have watched more carefully because the outcome was more an experiment in the relative abilities of different types of paper to soak up oil (turns out you are supposed to use powdered paint).  Luckily Gideon loved watching me pour the oil, water, paint and food coloring in a big dish (lots of "OOOOooooOOOhhhh"'s) and was similarly impressed when I dipped the pages into the concoction, even if they didn't emerge from the mess as works of art.  

In an effort to turn a fail into a win I put a tsp of oil, water, and dish soap in a small dish then blew drops of food coloring around it was a straw.  Gideon loved that and even tried to blow some color around himself.

blurry blowing

This time when I dipped the paper in I got a good amount of color.

A friend posted on facebook about a neat project were you paint over tissue paper with water to transfer the color to paper.  This was a fail for me since I didn't realize that there is a difference between craft tissue paper and the stuff I collect every holiday and squirrel away in a sack in my garage.  Since I had a giant pile of torn up tissue to play with I went ahead and mixed up some glue and water and we made our own tissue paper art for Daddy.

In the next few days I am going to try some activities with real, messy, scary, paint.  Stay tuned!