As the adult in the room, do you ever feel like your little one gets to experience all of these cool things while you sit alongside and observe? Well, here's your opportunity to jump in and get creative right alongside your little. These three art ideas will help you relax and channel your inner artist while having fun with your kid. Having a get-together? These ideas work great for larger groups, too.
Handmade Looms
How you make them:
1. Decorate the two pieces of cardboard that will be the ends of your looms. This could be as intricate or as simple as you’d like. We used some watercolor and oil pastels on ours.
2. Once the decorating is complete and completely dry, take the skewers and push them through the ridges in the cardboard, starting at the bottom and out the other.
3. Take the other piece of cardboard and push each skewer through the matching ridges. For adults or older children, you can push a skewer through each of the cardboard ridges. This will make the space in-between the skewers smaller making a more intricate weaving experience. For little ones, I would place a skewer every second to third ridge.
4. Once the loom is built, pick out the color of yarn you want to start with. If you want to only use one color of yarn, you don’t have to cut the length yet. If you want to use other colors, cut a length that you want to start with and tie it to the bottom, left hand skewer.
5. Tie the other end of your yarn onto the circular end of a safety pin and start weaving!
6. When you’re done filling the whole loom, tie the other end off and you're all done.
Printmaking With Recyclables
How you make them:
1. Squeeze a glob of the black paint onto one or two plates.
2. Using your toilet paper role, spread the black paint on the plate, making sure that the whole circle end gets covered when you stamp it in.
3. Use the role to stamp black circles all over your paper — overlapping them, spreading them apart, placing them together.
4. When you and your little one have covered the whole paper or as much as you would like to cover, let your paintings dry.
5. When the black paint is completely dry, use your watercolor to paint inside, in-between and outside of the black circles that you printed.
6. Voilà! You have two abstract pieces of art that you've made alongside your little one.
Collaborative Sculpture
How to build:
1. Treat this building process like a board game you would play with your little one. You're each going to take a turn putting pieces on and building onto your sculpture until you end up with a custom piece of art.
2. Your pieces will grow off of each other. It might start feeling like a game of Jenga as your towers get bigger and bigger. How tall can you go?
3. This is a fun project to come back to over time too, so no pressure to fill the space up in one sitting. In the end, you'll have a one-of-a-kind sculpture!
