Texture Painting!

I have been wanting to try painting with different found objects for some time, and I thought what better way to talk about Spring and the changes that the trees and nature are going through than bringing some of the items we see outside in, and then use them to paint with after we explored them with our hands!

Wee Man loves to pick up the sticks, pine cones and other objects found outside - so I brought some of those in. In our front garden we have a few different types of ferns, bushes and trees, so I started with clipping a couple of branches - one just beginning to get leaves, one without leaves (but slightly budded), a pine cone and some sticks. We talked about the buds, "baby" leaves and big leaves on the trees and touched the sticks then I told them we'd be painting! They were very excited (in fact, every time the little table comes out they get excited - it means colouring, play dough, painting or some other sort of craft!)

I also grabbed a few other things to paint with  - pipe cleaners, fabric (not pictured), and some small toy trucks (I thought they'd get a kick out of those!). The kids each got to pick one colour of paint (I couldn't handle any more than that with all the crazy I anticipated that would come with painting with found objects....haha!)

And then we began. I initially gave them one object to paint with at a time. At first they were receptive to dipping the fern branches into the paint....

...but then Wee Man decided that the branches and other objects from nature were "scary"....not sure why, as without paint they were very exciting?! So then we moved onto the pipe cleaners, fabric and trucks. That was well received by both kids and they continued to dip the objects into paint and "drive" or sweep them all over their papers!

The end result were some cool-looking paintings. The kids had fun and made a good mess!

I think I would like to try this activity again! Next time I think I will use a thicker paper though. I used the finger-paint paper we usually use for painting, but the paint really soaked the paper (it's much more water based than finger paint - for this activity I used the Clementine brand non-toxic paint) and the trucks and some of the rougher objects (pine cones & sticks) caused rips in the paper as it got more saturated. The kids didn't seem to mind though! ;-)