Smash Painting

This post is authored by Anna Reyner, a registered art therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. Anna is a nationally recognized arts advocate that has conducted over 500 hands-on art workshops for learners of all abilities. Follow Anna’s blog at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Eduation.

Special Needs Application:

Perfect for children with impaired fine motor skills.

Try a new technique that kids and adults both have fun with - it's called "smash painting." Smash painting releases lots of energy and let's active children have fun making dots of splashing color. When you use a completely washable paint like Colorations® Liquid Watercolorthere's no worry about making a mess.
How to begin? First get yourself some sponge tip plastic bottles (called bingo bottles) and a variety of Colorations® Liquid Watercolor paint. Fill each bottle with a different color. You'll need white construction paper, and if you want to make a portrait like the one pictured here, you'll need markers for the details in the portrait itself. Smash painting is used for the background in the example shown.

Next, practice smash painting and develop some skill with it by experimenting on a piece of scratch paper. Simply turn your bingo bottle upside down and bang it lightly onto your paper, creating a dot with splash marks coming out from the sides. Try banging the bingo bottle lightly, then harder, and watch how your result changes. Switch colors and overlap splash marks, creating a pattern. Now try making lines and shapes with your bingo bottle and experiment with different effects you can achieve by simply dragging your bingo bottle slowly across the page. Once you've practiced and gotten a feel for your materials, you're ready for your final picture.

The picture or portrait shown here combines watercolor markers in the more controlled figure drawing, with smash painting in the background. The contrast of these two techniques makes an interesting self portrait. To create a portrait like this, first present your class with markers and have them create a central drawing of their choice - in this case, a portrait of themselves. Then demonstrate the smash painting technique and suggest they use this technique for their background. First spend practice time with smash painting. The have children return to their self portrait and smash painting the background. The painting shown here was done with a group of first grade students during one 45 minute art session.

Paper Towel Quilt

This post is authored by Anna Reyner, a registered art therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. Anna is a nationally recognized arts advocate that has conducted over 500 hands-on art workshops for learners of all abilities. Follow Anna’s blog at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Eduation.

Special Needs Application:

Enhances social emotional interaction and cooperation

In the paper quilt shown here we also created circular coffee filter art using the same materials and techniques. Find directions for these in the Smart Art Lesson for Coffee Filter Art shown here. Finished paper squares and circles were laid out onto a piece of white mural paper, ready to be mounted with simple white glue. This simple paper craft shows off the beautiful brilliance of color. Isn't it wonderful eye candy?

I love watching simple paper towels come to life with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor. To create this "eye popping" paper quilt, we filled bingo bottles with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor and dabbed the color onto folded paper towel squares. These detailed patterns were created by school aged children, but younger children will create more free-form patterns with equally beautifully results. For best results use "2-ply" paper towels (better quality versions) since they soak up more color than "1-ply" paper towels and give your artwork a richer result.

Ocean in a Bottle

This post is authored by Anna Reyner, a registered art therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. Anna is a nationally recognized arts advocate that has conducted over 500 hands-on art workshops for learners of all abilities. Follow Anna’s blog at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Eduation.

Special Needs Application:

Visual stimulation encourages scientific thinking.

It's summer again and the perfect time for outdoor activities. Ocean in a Bottle captivates children and leads the way to science discoveries. Simply add Colorations® Liquid Watercolor and BioColor® Shimmer Powder to plain water in any clear plastic bottle. Cap tightly and shake it up vigorously. You'll immediately discover your bottle is full of swirling "oceans" of shimmery colored waves that stay in motion long after you've stopped shaking your bottle.

What's happening here? What principle of science does this exciting project illustrate? Water molecules, or H20, are invisible to the eye. If you shake up a water bottle, the water molecules begin swirling around quickly but you can't see them move because they're invisible to the eye. In this project you are "tagging" the water molecules with color and shimmer powder (a non-toxic micro glitter) which enables you to see the water and how it is set in motion as you shake it up. There is so much to the world around us that we cannot see without a microscope. Welcome to the fascinating world of earth science!

Hand Stencils

This post is authored by Anna Reyner, a registered art therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. Anna is a nationally recognized arts advocate that has conducted over 500 hands-on art workshops for learners of all abilities. Follow Anna’s blog at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education.

Special Needs Application:

Ease the concern of children who may be tactile defensive, or who do not want to get messy, by protecting their hands with latex free gloves when spraying the paint.

Do you like to spray paint? Debbie Glicksman of Los Angeles created a beautiful challah cover (shown below). Isn't it lovely? The cover began with me spraying her hands with watercolor as she held them over her fabric. You can adapt the same process easily with children.

First, gather white fabric scraps or yardage, stretch over rolled up newpapers and secure with pushpins to create a smooth working surface, then get out Colorations® Liquid Watercolor in spray bottles and begin to play. Use your hands as stencils and add other stencils you make yourself by cutting shapes out of file folders. Finish by adding details with puffy paint or permanent markers. When you paint with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor remember that it's a completely washable paint, so think fabric wall hangings and process oriented art. This is a great project for outdoor art while the weather is warm.