the initial reveal
N adores watercoloring! she loves to pick up a brush and sweep it across a page or push down reeeally hard on the page to see what the paint will do.
i saw this idea on blissfully domestic, and wanted to try it with my little one. i squirted a smidge of my grumbacher watercolors onto a divided palette. of course, you can do this project with any watercolors you have around. even fingerpaint would work. i got out a piece of 9×12 watercolor paper (any heavy stock would do) and my watercolor artist’s tape. i taped off the letter “N” (for N) in the center of the page. i got lucky – N’s initial is easy to make with straight tape. if the letter you want to make is curvy, i recommend cutting it out of contact paper to produce the same masking effect.
watercoloring
i gave N a fat round brush and invited her to watercolor all over the page, filling in all of the white space. she used one color at a time, and i cleaned her brush well in between. she cooed as she painted, “this is magic!” and “i’m making a purple puddle!” there were many “ooooh”s and “aaaah”s as she watched the colors mix and overlap.
after she had covered the page with bright jewel-toned paint, we set it aside to dry. once it was completely dry, i peeled back the artist’s tape to reveal a white letter N floating in a sea (or sky?) of colors! i put the painting into a simple frame, and now it hangs on the wall in N’s bedroom.
letter revealed and framed
i think this project would be cool to do in a multiple matted frame (like with three or four windows showing through a mat in the same frame) with a different letter in each to spell out a child’s initials or a name. even doing this on a large scale like we did, and framing each letter in a few frames across the wall of a bedroom would make a really dramatic, handmade wall hanging that your child can take pride in. N loves that she did this painting “all by [her]self!”
Related posts:
