paint cut paste

rub a dub dub, art in the tub! sure, it’s fun to be messy with art… and it’s also fun to make art while you get clean!

they make this cool bath crayon set with a cute ducky sponge just for this very thing – drawing in the tub! tonight when i busted out this surprise crayon set for novi, she was astonished. “what? you mean i can draw in my bathtub????!!!!? like, even on the wall?!?!” after explaining that it is ONLY with these crayons, and ONLY on the bath tub, my little artist went to work!

give the girl a crayon, she’ll tag something. seriously, her name is everywhere! sweetly, she likes to also write “mom”

and she drew a cute little yellow ducky in a blue pond, too…

but i think her favorite part was the yellow sponge duck who was her “artist’s assistant” and helped her clean all of her marks off the walls.

(thank you, ducky.)

we’ve done this blog before… a wax resist lesson with crayons and watercolors… but this time novi reeeally got the idea and had a ton of fun doing so.

it helped her to have a concept like “things that are in the sky” to draw, and then to paint a blue sky around that. novi chose to draw a tree and a sunshine with crayon, and then paint the sky blue.

other ideas could be to have your child draw “things in the grass” like flowers and bugs, etc, and paint the grass around it. or “things in the ocean” and paint the water around it, etc. you get the idea. i realized that this sort of directive helps to make this art task come to life.

then we moved onto some other mixed-media crayon/watercolor pieces…

novi: "this is julie, and she has the sun on her face so it's yellow"

when i was a little girl, i used to love melting down my old crayons into new and improved crayon shapes, so i thought this would be fun to do with novi this year. (for some reason, my childhood memories of melted wax involve styrofoam meat trays…??) we have a heart mini-muffin pan, which is fitting for the season. my ubercrafty friend over at pink and green mama did this with her daughter last year, as well, so i checked out her blog to learn about the oven settings.

all year, novi and i have saved up broken crayons and crayons from restaurants.

novi helped me to peel off the paper and break them into small chunks. (fyi: peeling cheap restaurant crayons is not the most fun task.)

we divvied the chunks up into the heart pan.

then we baked them at 250 degrees for about 15 minutes. i CAREFULLY had to carry the tray across the kitchen (minimal wax drippage onto new kitchen sisal rug. ick.) to the fridge where i set them to cool for about 15 minutes. to my surprise, they popped out of the tray very easily.

we put each one into a little valentine bag with a nametag on it and a note in it saying “i heART you” for all of novi’s friends. (hey, puns are okay for toddlers.)

though some of the baby siblings of novi’s friends, who are not yet in the crayon stage, got some felt hearts that i sewed for them instead.

put a little ART in your heART, valentine!