We were thinking about art ideas to try at home and we know that it might feel tricky to have all the art supplies to hand at home, especially when you weren’t planning to be stuck inside! But we want to reassure you that art can be made from anything! So today we are raiding the house for some art supplies and seeing what we can make. So trawl through the recycling bin and hunt in the bits and bobs drawers and see what you can find. Here’s our haul today…
We found cardboard tubes, boxes and plastic bottles and yogurt pots for building; scraps of ribbon, string, sticks and tinfoil for decorating; brown parcel paper and news papers could be drawing paper or you could even draw on an opened out cereal box; sticky tape, parcel tape, elastic bands, glue sticks and gorilla tape for holding constructions together; corks make good decorations or stamps for painting; magazines and junk mail that might be good for cutting out and collage; scissors are handy but non essential.
Wee ones honestly won’t care whether you have the finest art materials or if they began as a load of old junk. What matters is the chance to use their imagination and spend time with you.
Junk modelling:
If you have an assortment or recycling why not try presenting it to wee ones with an open invitation to see what they might make from it. You can follow along with their ideas and support them by helping with tricky bits like sticky tape if they need you. In our house this pile of rubbish started out by being made into a tower which swiftly turned into a tree house, then it got a look out post for lego people and a final flourish of a zip line! If you had paint or coloured pens around you could keep going and decorate but today we just decided to start playing with the lego people in it. You might also like to add cut out pictures from magazines and junk to give your creation some decoration, maybe some furniture from a catalogue if it’s a house or some people to go inside rockets, or some tinfoil to stick on the outside of a robot etc. Their imagination will be limitless.
If you were doing this with smaller babies you might want to just let them explore some different materials and practice stacking them up into towers. Or you could pick a box and let them paint onto something 3d for a change. In previous activities we have given some junk with a shiny surface, like a juice carton, a coating of old white house paint first to help kid’s paint to stick and give a nice blank canvas. Have a look at this link for instructions.
Drawing and painting onto recycled surfaces:
If you are running out of paper at home for drawing and painting onto, you can use anything you have to hand. Here we are drawing on the parcel paper which we found in the recycling bin and painting onto newspaper. It can actually give a nice effect. You could also try painting onto tinfoil to get some funny crackly effects or drawing in pens onto baking parchment then letting the light shine through. Sometimes wee ones might enjoy the freedom of painting onto junk materials as it means there is no pressure to produce something ‘good’ and they are able to experiment and have fun.
Some art/science with things that float:
The next day we kept the junk challenge going and repurposed some of the junk from our model with the idea of making something that could float. Once the paint dried we then tested the ships in the bath and tried a little science experiment by seeing which shape held the most marbles without sinking. The kids’ rainbow boat did loads better than mummy’s tinfoil ship!
Next post we will try making our own paints from things in the kitchen and then test them out.