Feathers and Pipe Cleaners and Tempera Paints, Oh My!

After going to school for art education, it's not a surprise that I try to do a lot of art projects with Isaac. He's finally getting to an age where he can do more things without a lot of issues. Yes, he's still young and many moms probably wouldn't try things with their kids that are this young, but hey... I'm a maverick.

We went to Hobby Lobby this morning to get a few bottles of tempera paints. I have acrylic here at the house, but I wanted something kid friendly and washable. My stuff isn't. I just got the primary colors and white. There are two reasons for this choice:

1.) You can make any color you need with the primary colors. White is just for lightening. With kids, you don't want to use dark colors anyway because they like things bright.

2.) It's cheaper.

Instead of using paint brushes, I found some things that I keep around in his art box like feathers, pipe cleaners and drinking straws.

First, we painted with feathers. These are fun because it gives the feeling of brush painting but they tend to leave feathers/down behind in the paint, or you can just leave the feather in the painting when you're done to give it that collage look. Isaac's turned out pretty cool.

Next we used a pipe cleaner. I bent it to make it easier for him to hold and manipulate. Plus, it gives a few different surfaces that he can use: a pointed part, a broad brushy part, etc.

Last, I tried to teach him how to blow through a drinking straw to blow paint around on the paper. He didn't pick up on this one quite yet which is fine. He can drink through a straw just fine, but blowing through it at the paint was out of his understanding. We'll try this one again in a month or two. So, I went ahead and did this one which I really liked.

I had bought cheap temperas so they are more translucent. Normally, I'd hate that but for this project, it worked really well. When you blow the colors together, they mix better and the mixed colors show up better. This one will be a great project for learning about colors and mixing them.

All in all, he had a blast and so did I. If you're afraid of a mess, don't paint with your 21 month old, however I think he did really well. He tends to not like having messy hands...