paint cut paste

we wanted to share a little follow up post about our adventures in painting the gluten free salt dough ornaments we made the other day. (see previous entry for recipe.)

after taking inventory, we ended up with more ornaments than we realized… wow, that batch of dough didn’t seem like it’d make this many!

we got out some materials for decorating these cute canvases. we had a palette of acrylics left over from another project that we had to use up, and we also got out our acrylic metallic paints (love the sparkle!) and some stamps and stamp pads.

N was interested in the paints, and had a great time applying every color of the rainbow on the ornaments.

i stamped some of the ornaments to attach them to holiday gifts. (N only wanted to paint.) the ink took a while to dry, but they turned out pretty cute.

stamps + baker's twine = sweet

N’s painted beauties were a colorful delight!

we were intending to give these to her friends, but at this point, i’m honestly not sure that she’ll part with any of these. (do your kids hoard the stuff they initially make as gifts? maybe this is a phase…?)

we have a lot more ornament ideas up our sleeves, so stay tuned for those… and we’ll see how the gifting of these turns out, but our friends may have to come visit our overly-accessorized tree to see these in person unless N gets into the christmas spirit sometime soon.

what types of ornaments are you making this year?

the other day, N and i set out to play with one of our favorite art media — liquid watercolors. recently there was a $1 per bottle sale on these at discount school supply (regularly $2.99, but they offer discounts all the time,) so we stocked up at a buck each! i just loooove how vibrant and translucent liquid watercolors can be!

i just put out four colors this time: magenta, turquoise, yellow, and purple. (the first three are a variation on primary colors that i just heart, and they mix to create beautiful combos! purple wasn’t even necessary, but it’s N’s favorite, soooo….)

free art play! these are the afternoons i live for. we did tons of experimenting with techniques — such as white crayon resist:

wet on wet watercoloring (saturate your paper first with water, then paint or drop colors onto it and watch them spread like magic):

sprinkling salt onto the painted page and watching the paint gather toward the crystals to create a stippled effect:

then we did N’s favorite method – squirted elmer’s glue onto the page, covered it with salt, and watched the paint get soaked up by the lines and blend into rainbowy goodness:

we played quite a bit. we even busted out the shaving cream at the end and did some paper marbling with the remaining paint in the jars. (because i hate to waste gorgeous paint and just have to use it up!) we did this over two years ago on the blog when N was just a wee thing, so check out that post for the technique. it’s amazingly beautiful and fun!

this day yielded so many lovely creations!

it was such a colorful afternoon with my sweet girlie and our favorite paints.

we felt like the color kittens! (do you know that old golden book? it’s classic!)

admittedly, i got all jazzed about pinterest painted pumpkins this year. i mean, have you seen the options?! it’s intense out there. martha is quaking in her fryes with the sheer amount of pumpkin talent run amok on the interwebs. and lemme tell ya, i am NO  threat to ms. stewart in any way, shape, or form. let’s talk total craft fail right now (and a quasi-recovery?) here are some of the pinterest gems that piqued my pumpkin passion.

you know i don’t use the words “craft” or “fail” much at all, (for totally different reasons) but this is a complete craft fail (do i have to put a hashtag in front of that term? eww, lingo.) and instead of ___fail, i’d rather just call it an art-gone-wrong moment. (but yes, #craftfail!) i was inspired to make some painter’s tape resist pumpkins (like bottom left pic above) and three pumpkins with B O O stenciled onto them. i figured they’d be all beautiful and i’d title the blog “smashing pumpkins” and everything. i bought these super inexpensive beauties at a produce stand.

taped and stickered them where i wanted them to remain orange.

i grabbed some matte spray paint, and went to town.

(the only thing that was cool here was the caravaggesque lighting of these photos, and that was an accident)

after the paint dried, i peeled off the tape and stickers… um, and MOST OF THE SPRAY PAINT! (grrr)

for the B O O pumpkins, i thought i’d use these cool vinyl letter stickers i bought at michael’s, but large stickers do not stick in any sort of flat way to a rounded pumpkin surface, so i knew they would not produce a clean line when painted around. so i thought (sure, just for like two seconds) and grabbed some rubber cement and painted the letters B O O onto the pumpkins instead.

i figured the rubber cement would roll right off after they were painted and show the letters i had carefully designed by hand. perhaps this would have worked (???) if i had NOT USED SPRAY PAINT!

so i dropped this agenda altogether. i purchased three white pumpkins. i stuck the vinyl letters onto them as best i could. i traced around the letters with a pencil. i painted inside my pencil lines with sepia acrylic ink.

and it worked out well enough for this year.

pumpkins drying against sliding glass door - fun effect

and now onto designing the rest of the mantel…

you may remember our watercolor silhouette father’s day gift from this summer… well, we did an acrylic version most recently that i wanted to share with you.

i used much the same process in making this one that i used for the watercolor version. i printed the same silhouette (from photo i took in spring – see instructions on the father’s day blog entry) onto contact paper. then i carefully cut it out with good scissors.

after peeling the adhesive off, i stuck it onto a pre-gessoed square canvas. (this one is 12″ x 12″.)

i mixed up a lovely neutral cafe-con-leche-esque color of acrylic paint and covered the entire canvas with it, including the sides. after the first coat was dry, i repeated with a second coat.

once the entire thing was dry, i carefully peeled off the silhouette sticker to reveal a white outline of my daughter’s cute head.

i then sprayed the whole canvas with clear acrylic coating to seal it and give it all a shine.

we gifted it to my mom (N’s “gwee”) for her birthday, and she loved it!

as you all may recall, we got a great package from decoart this summer containing lotsa artsy fun. someone in our house was definitely psyched about this surprise! we have made a few projects so far with these materials — like our first day of school chalkboard sign:

and our glow-in-the-dark rocks:

while there’s still much more fun to be had under our roof with these goodies, i thought we’d share the artsy love by giving some supplies away to you, dear readers! many of these giveaway items are part of our decoart surprise package and others are from our own overflowing stash. i am so thankful that you’re here, sharing in our artventures and continuing to provide me with amazing feedback and inspiration. enter to win some tangible tokens of my gratitude:

• decoart 8oz chalkboard paint (not pictured – oops)
• three 8oz bottles of decoart acrylic paint in the primary colors (red, yellow, blue)
• three 4oz bottles of decoart stencil paint in fuchsia, yellow, and turquoise
• decoart flower stencil set
• decoart glow-in-the-dark puffy paint
• decoart pearlizing medium – 2oz (fun to add to your acrylic paint to give it a shimmery glow)
• rose art rainbow swirl pencil set
• package of twelve #2 pencils
• 4 color ballpoint pen
• a little jar of pixie dust, for art-making magic!
• and one other very cool surprise…

DRAWING IS NOW CLOSED.

you can enter the giveaway drawing up to five times by doing one, a few, or all of the ideas below:

• entry #1: leaving a comment below telling us what you’d like to paint with chalkboard paint
• entry #2: like us on facebook & comment below to tell us you have
• entry #3: follow us on twitter & comment below to let us know you have
• entry #4: follow us on pinterest & comment below to let us know you have (i’d love to know your pinterest link so i can follow you back, too!)
• entry #5: share this giveaway on your own blog, your facebook wall, or twitter page and let us know you have by commenting below

apologies to all of my friends in other countries (who i also deeply appreciate,) but i can only ship these goodies within the continental USA. i will use a random number generator to choose a number of the winning comment on the autumn equinox – friday, september 23rd, at 9pm pacific/midnight eastern. be sure to leave your email address with your comments so that i can contact you if you win!

THE WINNER IS MANDY:

autumn is upon us next week… tis the season of harvesting the fruits of our labor. when we’re lucky, summer “labor” looks like a long walk on the beach. if you’ve got a lot of beach booty laying around, this could be a simple fun one for you and your littles.

our summer vacation to carova, north carolina, left us with plenty of beautiful shells with natural holes in them. perfect for jewelry, garland, and ornaments!

we set a few larger shells and some ribbon scraps aside with the intention of creating keepsakes for 12 of our family members (5 households) who shared this trip together.

first, i wrote “carova 2011″ on the inside of each shell with a sharpie.

then N got to work painting the shells with one of my favorite glimmery paint additives called “make it shimmer.”

this paint gives such a lovely mostly-silver, somewhat-pearly glisten to anything it touches. N applied it directly to our shells, but as a paint additive, it is meant to be mixed into plain paint to heighten it to shimmery loveliness.

once the shells were dry, we added colorful ribbon scraps from our stash.

while this project has roots in summer, it extends through the winter holidays. we are excited to give these to our family to display on their christmas trees or in their homes whenever they’d like.

it’s a fun memento from a sweet summer vacation. (surprise family – these will be coming your way before the holiday season! )

okay, so who among us hasn’t repinned this okra stamping tip junkie pin yet?

idea from newhouseproject.com featured on tip junkie

i pinned it a while back, and like most of my pins, considered it collected among zillions of ideas i may never get to. until tonight when i was cutting up okra — one of N’s absolute favorite foods of all time!

when i cut the tops off, i put them aside in a bowl. then gathered up some random scrap paper, squirted out two paint colors of N’s choosing, and let her have at it while our homemade gluten free pizza baked in the oven.

i probably could have cut the okra to have smoother, flatter surfaces. i probably could have picked out the seeds to make cleaner prints. i probably could have added a medium to my paints to thin them out. but i did not because i was frying okra. and that’s okay.

okra really is so cool looking.

the prints turned out kinda cool regardless of my jagged cutting and haphazardly thrown together while okra burns in the oil on stove art project.

a few days later. we made them into thank you notes and a birthday card.

we’ll likely try again another day with less of a time crunch and more planning. regardless, the fried okra was delish!