paint cut paste

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…

the idea of the process arts is one that i can get behind wholeheartedly. simply, it means “the practice of various modalities of self-expression for the purpose of process rather than product.” a lot of us moms, teachers, or caregivers who make art with kids (and many artists) tout this process over product concept. as an art therapist, it has been a big part of my work with clients, as well as the way i approach my own art and making art with my daughter. so i thought we’d delve into a little process painting together…

according to process arts expert, stuart cubley, “process is the actual doing, the experience in the moment. it is the journey into the unknown without assumption. it is being open to a larger dimension than the limited agendas of the mind. It is being there fully – in presence…

…the essence of the process arts work is freedom. it is about climbing out from under the demanding attitudes that enslave us, where we believe we can only be happy in an imagined future with an imagined outcome.”

in this spirit, and over the course of several days, N and i applied color (acrylic paint) to canvas together. we listened to music – one of our favorites for painting is ann licater’s flute music (which N asks for quite often when making art.) we chatted happily. we painted quietly and listened to the brush strokes, which were often rhythmic with all of these little dots and things happening on the canvas. we painted outside and listened to the birds, the wind, the people passing by on the sidewalk. we watched the painting unfold.

we approached the canvas with the agreement that our marks would likely eventually come into relationship, touching and overlapping, and that over the course of a few days, things would get covered over with layers of paint. we agreed not to “try to make something” rather just to enjoy the experience of the paint. i was intentional in the way i painted freely, so that i could model for N how it might be to watch the images shift and move. i was hoping (hypothesizing) that it might not only be freeing for her to make art in this way, but that it’s quite organic for a child…

um, not necessarily so at age four, at least for my kiddo. she became quite attached to certain images, so watching them change or overlap later became emotional. (many of the images she became attached to were ones i had made on the canvas, and when i tweaked them over painted over them, she got upset.)

this was such a rich opportunity to discuss process, and while staying within the metaphor of the art in our conversation, a deeper meaning of the discomfort of uncertainty, the idea of change, and of things being temporary was able to be worked through together and held or contained in a safe way in the art. gosh, i love art therapy.

next time, we’ll each get our own canvases — then i’ll see what develops. my guess is that it’ll be a whole different ballgame, but i wonder what might happen. on his web site, stuart cubley writes: “the process arts are uniquely effective in facilitating the inner imperative because they are:

• non goal oriented: they do not depend on a stereotype or formula.
• non-rational: they rely on greater reality than logic
• unpredictable: they face us immediately with the unknown
• transformative: they remove us from habitual patterns of behavior
• insight producing: they stimulate a more comprehensive perception
• freeing: they expose the restricting ways of the inner critic”

documenting changes during the process with her own camera

go forth and trust the process.

let me know what unfolds…

my daughter received a build your own kaleidoscope kit for her birthday a few months ago, and we just broke it out this week to create our own. oh glorious light shining through color, you get me every time!

as my regular readers know by now, i’m not a fan of pre-fab art kits, so my hope was to figure out from this kit how one could make this from materials in your recycling bin. hmm…

at first glance, it seemed like the materials provided were adaptable enough: cardboard tubes, plastic film for lenses, plastic rings, 3 reflective strips, glittery paper and beads, and decorative stickers. once we unwrapped the kit, i realized there are four different diameters of cardboard tubes that fit together precisely, and the plastic rings that allow for things to be held together fit them perfectly.

so perhaps this particular model is not as adaptable as i’d hoped — you could use a paper towel roll and then raid your gift wrapping tubes for various diameters of tubes that fit tightly inside of one another, use wax paper and clear wrap for lenses, and get plastic mirrored sheets and cut three strips of those. there are some ideas for simpler models to make with household items at the end of this entry. regardless, N had a lot of fun with this.

filling the end with sparkly treasures

we assembled the kaleidoscope according to the very easy (6 step) instructions.

there’s a part where we had to wait for glue to dry, and i have to say that’s when we had the bulk of our fun. first we taped together the three mirrored pieces they provided.

then we folded them into a triangle shape and enjoyed looking at each other, things in our home, and our cat at through them and cracking up!

(putting my iphone camera lens up to the mirror worked well for photos!) click image to view larger

N cut up the adhesive colorful sticker sheets and decorated the tubes with funky patterns.

you know you want that shirt - cafepress.com/paintcutpaste

groooovaaay!

when we put the kaleidoscope together, it was so satisfying to see it working!

we spent a lot of the afternoon twisting and shaking (the kaleidoscope, that is) to find new and beautiful patterns.

i found a few online tutorials for making your own kaleidoscope:

• simpler model with paper towel tube
• with a pringles can
• and with pvc pipe

we’re going to try one of these homegrown versions soon… ah, if only pringles were gluten free, i could snack while creating! (if nothing else, after writing this blog i will forever know how to spell kaleidoscope!)

i’m curious – have any of you made your own kaleidoscope from household items?

who wants a good reason to go to the dentist? who wants to get those pesky baby teeth outta your 3-year-old’s head a couple years early*? we do! we do! we do… apparently. woah, i think my memory of caramel apples is either way off base or caramel apples have gotten stickier over the past few decades. anyway, i bought a gross kit of caramel apple circle thingies at a gross grocery store (aka: a random one by my house that’s not whole foods) because i thought i’d be a fun, festive, fall momma if i did that. WRONG! (<–said in charlie murphy voice.)

it seemed so idyllic at the time of purchase… autumn breezes blowing (um, it’s 95 degrees today in the bay area, but whatever,) fall leaves falling (or dandelion weeds sprouting in my yard,) and delicious organic apples coated in yummy sugary goodness (unpronounceable chemicals.) my intentions were good. i brought the kit home and hyped it up to N.

we followed the easy instructions on the package (this would have been so much more blog-worthy if i’d made caramel myself, huh? oh well.) and stretched the small circle of sugar over our gorgeous fuji apple.

well, getting sticky was fun

then we baked it in a 200 degree oven for 5 minutes, and cooled it in the fridge. it looked delish.

with a gluten-free graham cracker on the side

we decided to share just one apple (thankfully.) i started it for us, and immediately locked my teeth together on the caramel. i figured i must have gotten a particularly heavy bite. i found a less caramel-saturated spot and invited N to bite it there. she was obviously grappling with the same sticky caramel issue. i had to dislodge it from the roof of her mouth with my finger. for some reason, we kept taking bites, thinking it’d get better.

it didn’t get better. so much for that. we had a teeth-brushing party together immediately after this. sigh. i think we’ll stick to (no pun intended) plain ol’ apples over here.

*no baby teeth were actually lost in the creation of this blog.

N is a big fan of balloons (like most earthlings) so we blew up a few little ones the other day to play.

leave the balloon blowing to the grown-ups

i remembered i had seen a cool post on ordinary life magic back in the spring involving balloons, yarn, glue, and water. i just love projects that involve the stuff i already have in the house. i thought it’d be fun to try this project outside the other day with our balloons. easy enough, right? well, read on…

if you look at the ordinary life magic post, you’ll see these lovely “yarn eggs” that the hardened-by-glue yarn left behind after the balloons popped. i was excited to end up with some of these skeletal orbs, and had some cool ideas for what we might do with them. so we got started… first, dip a 3 foot long (or so) strand of yarn into a mixture of craft glue and water. during the process, we made several mixtures of the craft glue (i used both elmer’s glue-all and aleen’s original tacky glue intermittently to use up the last of two bottles i had laying around the art room.)

then just begin to wrap the wet, sticky yarn around a partially blown up balloon.

after the balloons were all wrapped in lovely yarn scraps, we hung them in the playhouse to drip dry overnight. (if you’re doing this inside or over a floor you care about, be sure to put a towel down or do it over the bathtub.)

the next day we checked on the balloons, and attempted the next step… pop balloon and peel it away from the yarn. cool, i came prepared with a thumbtack. it was a snap, pop, then crackle moment. as the balloon deflated, it crackled as it took the yarn with it, imploding slowly. no pretty yarn orb.

deflated.

i tried peeling the balloon away from the yarn, but it was harder to do on some balloons than others. perhaps the ones with a thicker glue mixture were more stubborn? here are the sad results we got.

so i wrote to stephanie over at ordinary life magic and asked how she got the lovely results she got in an effort to learn where we might have gone wrong. here was her answer: “ours did that, too – some more than others. i just poked my fingers through the egg, and reshaped the ones that had deflated. you could probably use a spoon or something if you wanted to. they’ll stay if they sag and you reshape them, and then as they dry over days they’ll keep the reshaping.” good tips, though i think it was a little late for our yarn tangles, honestly.

we’ll try again another time, but i always like to post these art-gone-wrong experiences so you all can see our trials and errors. it’s also a nice example of the idea that in art, products are often unpredictable, so it’s all about the process! sometimes the materials dictate what they want to become, and we have the opportunity here to honor that and curb our attachment to results. we can model this for little ones who either can become frustrated and disappointed when art doesn’t turn out how they imagined OR were honestly not as goal-oriented as we were from the beginning, and probably just had fun playing with balloons and sticky goop. for me, the most satisfying part of this was indeed the process…  seeing our balloons all lined up outside on the line to dry was just lovely…

and seeing my little one’s mind excitedly expand to include the idea of using balloons for art materials was priceless!

yesterday i made egg salad with all of our hardboiled easter eggs, and as i was peeling these colorful little orbs, i thought that the pretty shells must have yet another life in them. then it hit me – mosaics.

i have always adored making mosaics. i made a huuuge one in grad school from tiles i painted, fired, cut, and grouted myself… mixed with mirrors and photos under glass. whew! this was going to be quite a different feat – so much tinier, so much easier, right? so i saved the shells.

then i organized them by color while N napped – way satisfying for this ROY G BIV nerd!

i decided that the colors would really pop on a black background. i took the liberty of drawing butterfly and dragonfly shapes on the papers before N woke up that we could fill in together later. your kids can draw their own shapes, or no shapes at all. the eggshells are so pretty in their own right that they don’t need a design, but i thought the colors and broken shapes lent themselves well to winged creatures.

when N was awake, we got out the trusty elmer’s glue and tried the mosaic. um, fail. okay… if you have older kids (like kids who have the dexterity to peel the tiniest, most delicate stickers off of sticker paper with half-dried glue on their hands and not get frustrated, that’s the age we’re going for. fyi: even i am barely mature enough to tolerate this.)

fill the design with glue, and start putting down the tiny shell bits. try not to scream. i totally lost N within about two minutes of this, though she was my colorist and told me which colors to make the insects’ body parts.

then she ran around a lot and drew on her magnadoodle, eventually revisiting to check on how i was doing.

she helped me to spread the remaining eggshells in our flowerbed when we were all finished.

all in all, i feel like this would be a great meditative exercise in patience for adults and older children, but hardly for toddlers. i thought i’d include it here, for those individuals. enjoy every little bit and piece!

where would my home be without ikea ribba frames?

i remember the curious process of making paper when i was a kid — it was always sort of odd to me that we’d take perfectly good paper, shred it up, get it wet, and make it into new lumpy paper. curious, indeed, but making your own paper is a fun and wonderful way to recycle scraps you may have laying around the house into something lovely (and something that blooms – read on!)

i was inspired by a guest post on make & takes and decided that creating plantable paper with flower seeds in it would make for lovely mother’s day cards. so N and i got busy collecting select colors of paper scraps we had around our art studio. (we chose analogous colors so that when they blended, they’d make a color that was not brown. N’s favorite colors are purple and red, so this worked out well. she helped in hunting for the scraps in our art room, and chose to recycle some of her own preschool art work and valentine hearts, too.)

then the ripping process began! little did i know that tearing is a good lesson for little hands! i sometimes forget that these seemingly ordinary tasks are things we learned along the way, so i took the opportunity to teach N about tearing. we tore them up into little bits no bigger than a square inch. next we put the colors into our blender.

we added just enough water to cover the paper shreds, then we blended until it looked like, as N said, “a raspberry smoothie.” after that, N sprinkled flower seeds into the pulp. (we chose zinnias.)

do not blend after the seeds are in – just stir them into the pulp with a spoon.

after that, i strained the pulp through a mesh strainer, pushing the water out with a wooden spoon. (if you don’t have a mesh strainer, just place a thin towel in the bottom of your colander and that should work, too.)

i had prepared a cookie sheet with an art rag/towel on it, then a layer of felt. once i pressed the water out of the pulp, i attempted to spread it out evenly onto the felt sheet. (this is where i realized that it may be really hard for this pulp to dry in such a way as to make a sheet of paper – it seemed really clumpy and separated.) i pressed on it (to squeeze water out) with another towel on top. N even helped with this using her small rolling pin.

i put it aside to dry overnight… and it actually took about a day and a half. once it was dry, i attempted to cut it into cute flower shapes; however, as i suspected, it was crumbly and very little of it was able to be cut. i tried and struggled a bit to get a few good pieces that look like flowers. you could also make hearts, butterflies, or whatever you wish… or whatever you can manage to cut. i get the sense that using cookie cutters when the pulp is almost dry would work better. or even using a stencil after to make a nice, clean shape. i think that next time we do it, we will try for a finer pulp so that it can be spread more thin on the felt, and hopefully stick together enough to make a sheet.

then we chose some colors to make a few cards, and glued the seed paper flowers onto the cards, using buttons for flower centers.

we will write a note inside with the planting instructions for the pastel zinnias in hopes that the recipients will watch these paper flowers bloom into real blossoms… sweet spring, easter, or mother’s day cards.