paint cut paste

okay, i can’t pass this one off as art, but it was so much fun that i had to share. aaaand, we checked off one of our summer activity cards today — water balloons!

we (uh, okay just me) got soaked trying to fill the water balloons with the hose, and then we had a great time with them!

the first batch

N had a great time watering the plants with them…

and watering the grass with them…

watering the garden wall with them…

there was also some degree of self-sacrafice involved

we were sure to gather up all of the balloon pieces when we were finished so that no animals would eat them. N gave them a new life by making little blankets out of them for her marbles (creative lady.)

happy water ballooning this summer!

i adore my iphone for many reasons, not all of them healthy. one of the more productive reasons is that it is allowing N to begin to make digital art.

surely, in her generation, she is likely to draw with pixels of light moreso than we ever did as kids. i mean, litebrite is as close as we came to light pictures, right?

i am a fan of digital art, myself. and it’s so fun to have N ask me if she can write and draw on my phone. we did a post on this same thing a little over a year ago, so i figured it was time to revisit this medium.

she loves picking her own colors and trying to create little scenes. the ones shown here are made my a free iphone app called scribble lite.

we also like colortilt. what are your favorite artsy iphone apps? comment (by clicking top left) to let us know! i’m always looking for a good free download.

this post is basically an ode to a material i have come to love – the crayola true to life series of dry media. no, they don’t pay me for this (but they totally should! right?! come on, someone send us some art materials to review…)

seriously, their crayons and colored pencils make the art look so cool! N came home from preschool one day with the fish below and asked, “can we get some swirly crayons for home?” um, yeah!

so we did and she went to town in her coloring books making all sorts of rainbowy creatures.

N says, "the bottom butterfly is sad because she's just purple."

wait, what you do mean it's not a sno-cone fight?

then she got her hands on some the true to life colored pencils, and after a trip to the local yeti museum (yep, she’s a fan) she got to work coloring a tree-hugging yeti.

i mean, does this bigfoot look real or what? someone call the tabloids!

this one began as a simple request by my little artist in residence: “last night i was thinking about drawing a ballerina using white and peach crayons, but those colors never show up!” so i suggested that we get out different colors of paper and she could draw with any and all of the drawing tools she has.

i brought out many colors and sizes of paper i have stashed. some construction paper, some were those little packs of card stock scraps you can buy cheaply. i put her crayons, colored pencils, and oil pastels out on the table.

then she got to draw the ballerina she had imagined… and said, ”you know, if i think hard enough, i can see what i want to draw in the air before i draw it.”

another dancer came after that (which she said is an image of herself)

then she changed themes and drew a very cool picture on black paper that she titled, “night surfing”

and made an image of a chocolate ice cream cone as a gift for our friends.

so as simple as this blog entry is, it is merely a reminder that it’s fun to switch it up sometimes and bust out all sorts of papers to draw on… it inspires kids’ imaginations in different ways and new images arise. try it out and see what emerges…

there’s a window in N’s playhouse outside that gets amazing afternoon light… it was begging for some prismatic suncatchers!

i found these cool crystal pieces from an old chandelier ages ago at an antique flea market for maybe a buck each, if that. they seemed like perfect little rainbow-making charms to drop from the bottom of each of our three light-catching strands. because we used nylon bead cord, i just tied a knot to the little loops at the end of the chandelier pieces, and added beads from there. (if you use bead wire, you can rig it like you would the end of a necklace.)

being a formerly avid beader, i have a stash of bead string and wire around the art room, as well as plenty of random cheesy plastic and glass sparkly beads that little girls like to play with. if you head to michael’s or check on amazon.com, you are likely to find a large pack of plastic sparkly beads for a few dollars. mirrored pieces are nice, too, but i didn’t have any for this.

one night, after dinner, N and i made a bowl of the most colorful and reflective beads we could find. (because we did this in the evening, the photos look darker. sorry. i’m not a fan of using flash.) N had plenty of fun just putting her hands in the bowl to feel the beads – like a tiny sensory table.

she searched for treasures to thread onto our bead cord.

we made three strands of totally random color order and all different lengths.

we tied loops in the top of them so that the next day we could hang them from nails in the wall of the shed-turned-playhouse above the window.

they’re already making rainbows all over the walls in the afternoon sunshine… love it!

i entertained the thought of naturally dyeing easter eggs this year. i’ve wanted to every year, and even found a great tutorial on martha stewart for veggie dyed eggs, but then we paased anyway. 99 cents for a paas kit is hard to beat, especially when compared to purchasing beets, yellow onions, cabbage, etc.

we did, however, try out some new strategies we saw all on the web this season. good stuff.

like using a rubber band on the egg (and double dipping) to block out certain areas:

and criss crossing electrical tape to make a grid (yellow and blue make green lesson here.)

i also tried to make a “cracked egg” effect on, well, a cracked egg. kinda cute.

as stepford as i feel saying so, martha is a genius. (or rather the people who work for her at her empire are geniuses.) i mean seriously,  look at this slideshow of eggs!!!

we did the usual crayon resist thang.

and all in all, we had some good springy fun together! happy springtime of blooming and rebirthing! it’s an egggggscellent time of year, isn’t it?

and they made for a wonderful breakfast –

especially when all dolled up like chicks paired with lemonade scones… thanks to just jenn’s recipe blog.

after making so many wooden easter and springtime friends, N really wanted to make more out of “clay.” since we don’t have a kiln over here, i busted out the model magic, and she got down to business.

N made lots of eggs and a caterpillar. i also helped her make the 2 spring chickies you see above, and a bunny.

it took two days for the model magic eggs to dry (they’re dense, even though they’re lightweight.) when they were ready, we painted them with acrylics. we first had a lesson in what-happens-to-each-color-of-the-rainbow-when-mixed-with-white-paint? PASTELS FOR SPRING!

we had a little painting party…

we probably got more paint on our hands than the figures and eggs, but it was all good clean fun.

we loved decorating our home with our new little spring sculptures…