Painted Paper

Over the past few years, as I have been browsing the web looking at kids' art project ideas, I have come across a lot of Eric Carle-esque painted paper art.  They always looked like great, fun projects for the kids, integrating shapes and textures and sensory exploration, but I was always a bit unsure about how to go about making the painted paper.  The various art project sites that featured the painted paper projects were normally geared toward classrooms full of children and they all warned about what a messy project it was.  Hmmmmmmm.

So here is my rundown of home-based, low-mess painted paper process art with my three boys.

The Set-Up:

I decided to have four stations each contained on a cookie sheet.  I used take-out trays to hold the paint and texture tools.  Then I laid out three colors at each station that I thought would work well together.

My texture tools mostly came from around the house and the dollar store.  At each station I wanted at least one tool to stamp/sponge with and one tool to scrape with.  There were also some stencils and some other unusual textures.

I also filled a bucket with warm, slightly soapy water for the frequent hand washes I anticipated.

The Process:

Two stations were on the floor and two were on the table.  The boys were free to move to an open station whenever they finished a painting.

The Results:

These are just a few of the painted papers the boys created.

The Clean Up:

I tossed the paint trays and plopped all the brushes and texture tools into the washing up bucket.  As they soaked for a few minutes, I washed the cookie sheets and wiped up the couple paint dribbles that had gotten onto the table and floor.  Most of the texture tools are just plastic and/or metal, so they washed up easy-peasy.  The brushes and sponges took a couple more minutes, but the whole clean up effort only took about 15 minutes total, so about average compared to most of the art projects we do around here.