Our girl loves painting. She has always loved it, since we first handed her a brush and some paints at about 18 months. I don’t believe that demonstrates anything exceptional about her. I believe just about any kid would love painting, given the opportunity. Here she is at just over 2 yrs:
She usually paints with watercolors, because that’s what we had lying around. I’ve tried to find finger paint in Taiwan and couldn’t. Any kid would love finger paints, due to the great sensual pleasure of squooshing ones fingers around in the paint. I later bought a few small jars of poster paint from Kingstone, but it turns out the watercolors are better. I have her pick 4 colors from the box of 20 or so tubes, I’ll squeeze it out of hte tubes and daub each of the colors with a brush and water to prepare them, but then she’s on her own. I also set up a water jug in front of her so she can rinse her brush between colors, which is also a great joy for her.
Then, my wife took her to some place where the kids were handed pre-made masks that they could paint. My girl made a mask that she loves. I was happy with that, but figured we could do one better – we could make the mask from scratch at home, using paper mache. When I was a kid we made all sorts of things from paper mache, which we then painted. That was decades ago, but I figured it shouldn’t be too hard. It didn’t work exactly as I planned, but we had a lot of fun. We made a mask for daddy and daughter and she loves them both. Here’s how we did it.
Paper mache is simple. You simply tear strips of newspaper, dip them in a bowl containing a soupy mixture of flour and water (like a runny pancake mix), place strip after strip on top of some sort of form. Smooth each strip after application and set the thing aside after a few layers so it can dry overnight, before applying another layer, building it into the desired shape. It’s simple, non-toxic, uses easily-available ingredients, and dries into a hard, lightweight, object that is easily painted.
To create a form for hte masks, I decided to tear a large piece of aluminum foil and smoosh it over her face (and mine), conforming it gently to the eyes, nose, etc and making a rough tinfoil approximation of her face. Some people suggest using a baloon or a bowl for a form, but I wanted it to be more accurate. It’s tough with the tin foil, though, because it’s so flimsy, so one must handle it with great care.
Of course one must spread out lots of newspapers on the working surface before starting the paper mache. It gets messy (but that’s part of the fun). One has to be very careful applying the first few layers on the tinfoil to avoid caving it in. To be honest, I did most of the work, because my girl (at 2.7 yrs) is not quite old enough to do it, but she was extremely excited about the project, stood eagerly by my side thrilled with the big adventure.
But she quickly insisted upon grabbing all the newspaper strips and dipping them in the soup for me. See below.
The above photo is somewhat early in the process. Later she was gleefully running her hands through the goop.
After the mask started taking form, we cut out the eye and mouth holes with scissors to make them more correct, and it looked like this.
Finally, after several sessions of applying the goopy strips of newspaper and letting them harden over night, the masks were ready for painting.
She wanted a monkey mask and wanted me to have a tiger. I was going to let her paint them herself, but in the end I decided to paint them to ensure they would be somewhat recognizable. I used ordinary poster paint and decided to use a somewhat abstract, impressionistic approach instead of insisting on realism. Here’s the finished masks.
We used large rubber bands to hold the masks on. I should look for some clear spray at the art store to spray them with to ensure that the paint doesn’t all chip and rub off, but haven’t gotten around to that.
In conclusion, the project was a lot of fun for both of us (and my wife even backed off and let us have our fun without getting too worried about the mess). Maybe next time I’ll let her do more of it and not worry about the final results, but she had a blast accompanying me, being my assistant, and receiving the finished products, which she wears often (for some reason she has taken to wearing a mask whenever she sits on the toilet, which is fine, as we can make going pee pee a game: “do you want to wear the monkey mask or the tiger mask?”).
Does anyone else do arts/crafts projects with their kids? What do/did they like?
Thanks!!!
you’ll have to convince them not to play with the puppets til the glue has dried.