Crafty Moms Share: painting

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Color Explorations: Painting

A few things happened in my life recently to bring me to start exploring color again with Hazel. The first is I went to see the Quilts and Color: The Pilgrim/Roy Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts with my mom. The exhibit really focused on how the colors played with one another and I thought it would be neat to take Hazel to see it. It will still be there when she is out of school, so we will be going. I found it so interesting to see the movement in some of them. Here are a few of my favorites.

Then last week I went to a paint party. Have you been to one of them yet? I had actually planned this one as a fundraiser for my church. We met at a local restaurant and had dinner first and then joined the instructor in the back room of the restaurant for our paint lesson.We chose to use an instructor from North Shore Paint Party and I picked the sunset from her gallery. She gave us only five colors of paints to make our sunset paintings--red, blue, yellow, white and black. Hazel was rather jealous that I was going to this and when I saw all the paint mixing to get the colors you want, I knew I would have to try it with her. Since I was not completely happy with the colors in my painting, I decided to try again with Hazel. I learned when you are happy with the color or pretty happy with it to stop. If you keep painting it will eventually get muddy and dark. It was amazing to see all the different versions of the painting at the party.

My Paint Party Painting

Since I had some acrylics, brushes and canvases, we tried it the next day. Since the weather was gorgeous we painted outside. I however did not have the correct acrylics and should have bought artist acrylics and not the little bottles I had. Oh, well. We had fun and love our new paintings. For supplies you need red, yellow, blue, black and white paint, three brushes (large, medium and small), a canvas (we used 16" x 20"), a cup of water, a paper plate for your palette, and paper towels. Oh, and an easel.

You give each painter a paper plate with a spot of each color on it and three brushes. They can mix colors on their plate. We started in the upper left corner with blue for the sky. Then we mixed other colors. In the class the instructions were to mix green, but I tried purple at home instead.

I made the mistake of not showing Hazel how to do the strokes to fill in the area, so hers was blotchy at first. I painted a yellow horizon line on hers so she would know where the sunset ended and we talked about the colors to use for the sunset.

When we both had finished our skies we stopped and looked at each others. At this point Hazel had a bit of a meltdown since she liked mine better than hers and she decided she would never be able to paint well. I showed her the stroke and helped her achieve more of a sky like mine.

My Sky

Then we started on the water. The water is a bit easier since it is mostly blue. I helped her a bit more than I normally would have but that was because of her mood. I also did her trees for her since she was sure she would not be able to do them.

Hazel's Sunset Painting

My Sunset Painting

I added a lighthouse to mine for Steve. He loves lighthouses. We have both paintings hanging up now. Hazel has hers in her room. She still wanted to paint so we grabbed more canvases. She really wanted to make grey paint. Our paper plates looked like this in the end. You can also use the water to help mix the colors a bit on the canvas, but this worked better with the other acrylics.

Hazel's Second Painting

I did not help at all with her second painting. While she did this I painted her a flower for her room.

We have been reading books on color as well. Our favorite has been A Color Sampler by Kathleen Westray. Hazel is really enjoying learning more about colors. She already knew her primary and secondary colors. Now we have been exploring with other things like tints and shades.

I will share more of our color explorations soon. For more experiments with color check out:

Book Inspired Painting
The Colors of Us
The Colors in Nature
Luka's Quilt
Dying Yarn with Fruit and Vegetables Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Outside Water Play
Picture a Tree
Mixing Colors
Brown at the Zoo

Sharing Saturday 14-19

Wow, what great ideas were shared last week!! If you have not checked them all out, you should!! There was not one most clicked, so I picked a few favorites in two categories for you. The first being spring and Mother's Day themed and the second being painting.

1) From Tot Schooling: Easy Mother's Day Pop-Up Card
2) From JDaniel4's Mom: Mother's Day Pictures for Homemade Cards
3) From Toddling in the Fast Lane: Magazine Flowers
4) From Sparkling Buds: Making Yarn Flowers Using Building Blocks
5) From Sparkling Buds: Easy Paper Flower
6) From Crystal's Tiny Treasures: Paper Plate Sunshine Craft

1) From Parenting Chaos: Paint With Flowers
2) From Mini Monets and Mommies: Kids' Nature Art Activity: Painting with Plants!
3) From Where Imagination Grows: Train Painting
4) From My Nearest and Dearest: 13 Fun Ways to Play and Create with Paint

Thank you to everyone who shared last week!! I hope you will join us and share again!! If you are featured here, please feel free to grab a featured button to display proudly on your blog.

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From Your Hostess: This week we shared our easy Minnie Mouse napkin rings for a birthday party, Hazel's garden/meadow to go with On Meadowview Street, our outdoor play and explorations, our needle felted acorn capped strawberry craft, and an easy pressed flower vases for gifts for teachers or moms made with a recycled jar.

Now for This Week's Party
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Advent Week 4: Love

Before I begin this post's content, I want to share that I just updated my Winter Solstice post with the best book to read!! We did not receive it from the library before the original post. The addition is towards the end of the post. Now onto our Advent post.

This is the fourth week of Advent. We light our final purple candle. As you light each candle you remember how Jesus brought us hope, peace, joy and now love. Some Advent wreaths have a white candle in the middle. This candle is for Christ and is lit either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Now love is such an important theme. There are so many Bible scriptures you can think of to go with love..."...The greatest of these is love." 1 Corinthians 13:13. We included God Gave Us Love by Lisa Tawn Bergren in our books to read today. I feel this is a perfect book to read to explain the theme.

For those that do not know this series of books, Little Cub learns about God from different people in her family. In this one, she is with her grandfather. They talk about how God wants us to love everyone. They also talk about how there are different kinds of love and the greatest love comes from God. And yes, they mention God sending is only Son to us.

When we did our clay ornaments last week, we also made some love ones. We used love rubber stamps to get the words on them.

The other craft is to make heart ornaments from pipe cleaners and tri-beads. They are very easy. Put the beads in whatever pattern (or no pattern) onto the pipe cleaner. Then bend and twist the ends of the pipe cleaner to make a heart. Now you can add a ribbon or just hang it as we did.

Update on our Advent Calendar Crafts:

Donkey Ornament

Hazel was working on the wisemen today. I did the camel with the wisemen while she made the wisemen. I also glued the stable together for her. I like how they are coming out and think she is doing a wonderful job. We added some white wool to the sheep and the shepherds. Hazel decided the wisemen needed gold and silver and used glitter glue. She has been really enjoying this year's Advent calendar.

How did you celebrate Advent this year?

For more on our Advent:

Easily Updated Photo Display for Grandparents

Have you entered my current giveaway yet?

So I was thinking of getting my parents and mother-in-law one of those frames that opens in the front so you can easily change the photo or artwork. Then I saw a pin for using a ribbon, miniature clothespins and a child's painting. I wish I could find the pin to share the source with you, but after almost an hour of searching, I'm giving up. (If it was yours, please let me know so I can link to it.) I had Hazel paint to canvases that I had already bought. Then I stapled some ribbon to them on the back.

Once the ribbon was hung, I just hung a photo well actually two (both her school pictures this year) on each one.

I buy the canvases when they go on sale at the craft stores. I picked up a package of miniature clothespins for around $3, so this is a pretty inexpensive, but personal gift and it gives them a way to easily adapt to whatever size photograph you give them each year, or to display more than one depending on the canvas size you use. What do you think?

Pumpkin Time! Decorated Pumpkins, Pumpkin Books, & More

Have you entered my current giveaway yet?

With Halloween only 15 days away, I thought I would share some of the ways we have been decorating pumpkins and more!! I guess I better get serious about sewing Hazel's costume. This year we planted some pumpkins in our garden. We saved seeds from last year's pumpkins and bought a pumpkin plant. We saved seeds from white pumpkins and sugar pumpkins. Apparently white pumpkins take over and don't grow white the next year. We ended up with two (and there is one more small one out there) skinny and kind of tall orange pumpkins. These took over the pumpkin area and also hindered the zucchini (we got our first zucchini of the year last week now that the pumpkin vine is dying off).

When we were at Hazel's best friend's house for a playdate a few weeks ago, they had already decorated and had some great pumpkin ideas, so we borrowed a few of theirs with a few changes. They had found a kit to make two black lace pumpkins at Target. It came with pom pom spiders. We did not find the kit at our small Target, but found some black lace tights and stretchy spiders.

We used our homegrown pumpkins since they were so skinny. Total cost was $6.

They also had a pumpkin they painted with blackboard paint and then her friend wanted to spray it with gold spray paint. The result was beautiful. We used gourds for the rest of our decorations since I have been told to watch my spending. Since we did not have blackboard paint, we used Hazel's black tempura paint. I had some gold glitter paint and did another coat with it. The one problem with the tempura was the other paint made it watery again, so there are some orange spots showing. We also did one black and then Hazel used her glitter nail polishes to decorate it. She used blue, pink, gold, silver and multicolored glitter nail polish on it.

I had painted two gourds with the gold glitter paint--an orange gourd and a white gourd. Then Hazel added some of her glitter nail polish to the top of the orange one.

Hazel was having so much fun painting with her nail polish that I bought her another white gourd to paint. (She also painted some acorns with it.) I thought she would use the glitter ones, but she decided to use the solid colors first.

Finally when I was at Target again, I saw a kit using a fake gourd and making it a spider. I knew we had some fake gourds that we used for turkeys last Thanksgiving and we painted one of those black. Then we used pipe cleaners to give it legs and glued on eyes.

We also made some pumpkin bread last week. We first cut open two sugar pumpkins and enjoyed cleaning them out. Hazel had the best time playing with the goo and seeds. I believe she said, "Sometimes it is fun to get messy."

Then she liked the feel of the seeds and trying to get them offer her fingers.

After they were clean we baked them in the oven for an hour and a half at 350. Then I pureed the insides and put it in the refrigerator. We made pumpkin bread later in the week. We used the recipe here, but changed it to be gluten free. One loaf we ate and the other we brought to her school for Grandparents' Day.

Finally some of the pumpkin books we have been enjoying lately. Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman is among one of Hazel's all time favorites! Three of them go into how pumpkins grow. We also shared the Pumpkin Fairy story a few years ago. Are you getting ready for Halloween?

Pottery Barn Inspired Painted Acorns

Have you entered my current giveaway yet? You can enter it every day!!

So a week or so ago, Hazel and I were walking around the new mall near our house and went into Pottery Barn to look around. My little shopper girl did not want to leave since there were so many beautiful things to look at, however one thing we saw were gold painted acorns. We decided we could make some and Hazel wanted to make them rainbow colors. While we were out making apple and nature prints, we rolled some of our acorns around int he fall colored paints.

After the paint dried I glued the tops back on and we displayed them. First we did a display with the needle felted acorns I made in the past.

Then we pulled out some of our autumn decorations and found leaf bowls to put them in.

Today, I also made some gold colored ones, however what I thought was gold paint ended up being more of a glitter paint. Oh, well. I like them still.

To get the ones like Pottery Barn I am guessing you would need gold spray paint. We don't have any, so these will have to do for now. Happy Autumn!!

Welcome Fall! Apple Prints and More!

This weekend fall began here. On Friday it was nice outside, so I decided to get Hazel outside and doing something. Now in our backyard we have two apple trees that have had many apples this year. We do not pick these apples. Steve told me they were not the kind of apples you eat. After smelling them this year, I think he may be wrong. However I am not tall enough to get them and fear ladders too much to try on my own. He hasn't bothered to pick one for me and the ones on the ground do not look so good, but the deer are enjoying them. Here is one tree after most of them have fallen to the ground.

Here is what it looks like on the ground. Steve goes and picks up the ones in the grass and puts them in the "garden" under the trees, so no one trips and the landscaper won't have a problem with the mower.

I had Hazel look for two non-mushy ones that we could cut to make apple prints while I got the rest of our supplies. I cut one apple down the center of the core vertically and the other horizontally (so you get the star).

Then I gave her fall colors of paints and white paper and let her have fun.

She was having so much fun with the apples, we decided to add in pinecones, acorns, flowers and leave.

She made four nature prints. On a few you can see the stars of the inside the apples, but not too much.

Now we have some beautiful fall prints. I was thinking of cutting them and making cards, but Hazel said she would miss them too much. We will see. How did you welcome the new season where you are?