A Festival of Painting

This morning turned into a celebration of different painting activities.  All of these techniques and ideas are well known and well loved by children young and old.  First we put together a selection of colours to start with and laid out various materials and equipment for the children to use.  Then I let them take the lead and choose what to do.

Girl pointed at the brush and began mark making straight away.  Easy, simple straightforward!

Boy noticed we had the colours of the rainbow and so he said he wanted to paint a rainbow.  A great opportunity to do some symmetry painting.  We have made abstract designs and butterflies ths way but never a rainbow so this was new for us.  He painted strips of colour - he asked which order the colours went it.

 Then he folded the paper over in half to make a mirror image of his work.

Girl chose to do some printing next.  We used biscuit cutters on different shapes.  You can use pretty much anything for printing - vegetables and fruit, fingers, hands, feet, anything with texture or shape that might be interesting.

There are one or two 'fist' prints in there too!
Boy then moved onto 'blow' painting.  For this you need to water down the paint so it's quite runny.  Spoon a little paint onto the paper and then use a straw to blow the paint in different directions.

Finally we did 'string' painting.  Or in this case it became wool painting because I had that to hand.

Here's how to do it.  Take a length of string or yarn and soak it in some paint.  Then place onto paper any way you choose.

Fold it over and then gently pull the string out.

Here is the result......

We had such fun painting this morning and there are so many creative and wonderful ideas on various sites I thought I'd provide links to a few which I think are really interesting and useful
Canvas Painting at Messy Kids
Painting with toy cars and trucks at Play Create Explore
Pendulum Painting at Quirky Momma
Edible Homemade Finger Painting at The Imagination Tree
And this last one we did today at pre school and we'll finish it off tomorrow but it is really lovely
Eric Carle Prints at The Imagination Tree

You might also want to have a look at these previous posts which include painting:
Seashell Painting
Sand and Paint
Vegetable Printing


There are thousands more things to do with paint.  Check out the ideas I've suggested and have a go at some of them!