Watercolour cards

Jasmine and I made watercolour cards. I was inspired by an activity I saw on Grow Creative blog - striped heart watercolour tutorial. I follow Elise's blog regularly. She is very talented with her use of watercolours. I recommend you check out her blog tutorial. Jasmine and I are beginners when it comes to watercolours. However, we had fun experimenting and are pretty pleased with what we created.

As Elise suggested, we first outlined our shape on a sheet of thick white paper. We drew our hearts free-hand but traced around bought cardboard cut-outs for our cloud and flower. I made stripes across the shapes using a ruler. Jasmine and I then used paint brushes dipped in water to apply the watercolours to each stripe.

When the paint had dried we cut out the shapes. We wrote a birthday message on one of the hearts.

Styrofoam sculptures and prints

When I found myself with a bunch of styrofoam packaging left over from some new piece of equipment my husband purchased for the garden, I remembered a great post I had seen over at The Artful Parent. They made styrofoam scupltures. We decided to do something similar. We used:

• broken pieces of styrofoam
• colourful pipe cleaners
• feathers
• glue
• paint
• toothpicks
• wooden skewers
• colourful paddle pop sticks

We had a great deal of fun twisting the pipe cleaners and experimenting with different coloured feathers and paint. We were hoping to make a super tall sculpture but we discovered that there is a definite technique required in making sure your sculpture doesn't tip over.

We also tried printing different patterns using the styrofoam and paint. We used a pencil to poke holes in the styrofoam and then covered the image with a layer of paint before impressing it on a clean piece of paper.

 

Mosaic pots

Jasmine and I have been making mosaic pots for the garden after school this week. We used the following materials from Bunnings hardware store:

• waterproof teracotta pots
• Mandala Art mosaic glue paste
• Mandala Art glass mosaic tiles, and
• mosaic glass cutting tool. 

For the first pot, we made different patterns for the four different sides of the pot. To begin with Jasmine made a squiggly line with glue and laid a variety of coloured square tiles along the line.

We left the first pot to dry overnight. Jasmine drew a butterfly on another pot with a lead pencil and she began squeezing out the glue and sticking on small square tiles.

I think she did a fabulous job.

We talked about different ideas for decorating pots, inspired by what's in the garden and decided to try making a dragonfly, a green leaf and some autumn leaves. It was a bit tricky for Jasmine to break the tiles. She tried to break a few with my mosiac cutting tool and my sunglasses on to protect her eyes but mostly it was safest and easiest for me to cut the tiles.



Our dragonfly is probably my favourite. 

 And I don't mind our green leaf.

Unfortunately our autumn leaves didn't really work out so we turned them into a band of autumn colours instead.

For the designs we chose, it wasn't necessary to use grout. However, we will soon try a different pot and a new number for our house where we will use grout. I will let you know how this goes.

Mod podge pencil holders

It's been an exciting week in our household with Alex and Jasmine starting school. There's been a few ups and downs with so many new things to get used to. Today we welcomed two puppies into our household. The kids said it was "the best day ever .... even better than Christmas".

Amid all these new events, Jasmine and I have still managed to potter around in our craft room. We bought some MDF pencil holders at the hardware store on a recent visit. This week we decided to decorate them with:

• paint
• mod podge
• scrap book paper.

Step 1: Apply one or two coats of craft paint and leave to dry.



Step 2: Cut out scrapbook paper images.



 

Step 3: Stick the images on the dry paint using mod podge. The mod podge acts like glue under the paper and then if you add a few coats on top of the paper it leaves a nice smooth finish. Such great stuff!

Intro to still life drawing

What a rainy weekend we've just had. Normally I'm not a big fan of the rain but after all the stinking hot days it made for a welcome change. It also gave us plenty of time for indoor activities such as games and drawing.

Jasmine and I had fun experimenting with still life drawing, using the lovely two tiered set of Derwent coloured pencils she was given for Christmas. Such beautiful pencils. What a lucky girl! I consider myself pretty fortunate to be able to share them too.

Choosing which fruit and vegies to draw was a fun activity in itself. The choosing process made us stop and think about colour, size, shape and texture of different foods.

Jasmine did a great job drawing the food in front of her. She really studied the different colours and how the light fell on the objects.

We didn't labour on our drawings but instead enjoyed the exploration of colour and form. We liked the moon shape of the rockmelon slices ...

And the dark, rich purples, reds and greens of the plums.

Our final display involved mushrooms, capsicums and celery.

Then the kids decided it was time to eat the display!

Although we didn't create any masterpieces worth framing, I definitely recommend setting up this activity with your kids. It was a relaxing way to spend time and great drawing practice.

Fun to grow seeds

Life seems to be busy busy at the moment with my husband travelling for work, painters in my living room and carpet being laid. We haven't had the space for much art and craft. However, we always have to try some sort of activity to keep us entertained. So we retrieved our box of seeds from the top of the kitchen cupboard and explored growing sprouts in different shapes.

We bought the bird seeds from the supermarket. We occasionally put seeds out for the birds in our backyard. I had also heard you can grow them, kinda like alfalfa sprouts, but you can't eat them.

The kids chose their favourite cookie cutter shapes.

We used a plastic tray. Lay 5 sheets of kitchen paper across the tray. Wet thoroughly with water.

 Then sprinkle your seeds. We will keep watering every day or so and see what happens ...

Wooden painted cubby house

This summer holiday, we finally found time to make our much talked about cubby house for the kids. My husband used pallets for the base, left over wood from when he made our pergola and bought some sheets of plywood from the hardware store.

For the windows, the kids requested a butterly and bat cut out. My husband drew the outline with pencil. He then used a jigsaw to cut the holes.

It was amazingly quick and simple.

The kids and I were in charge of painting. There was a bit of debate around colour. Green was a definite but Alex wanted blue and Jasmine purple. In the end we decided that green and purple were a good match to the agapanthas in our garden. I did most of the painting though the kids were really keen to help. The only problem with letting them help was trying to curtail the mess. They managed to drip paint everywhere and totally cover their shoes. Lucky they were wearing their old worn out shoes! In the end I encouraged the kids to paint a spare piece of plywood with their student paints while I focused on the cubby.

We added some pattern by spray painting around leaves. The kids went around the garden collecting a variety of leaves. We used blu-tack to stick the leaves to the walls.

The kids practiced using the spray cans on newspaper first. Again it was a bit tricky for them and messy so I did most of the spraying.

We found some gloves for Jasmine which made it much easier for her to help peal off the leaves without coating her fingers in the smelly paint.

I was recently given a good tip. If you have paint on you and need to use turps to remove it, finish off by squeezing lime on your skin and it removes the smell.