A little thank you gift...

Di's mom gave Ebi-kun some 'spends' which he used to get this cool water colour painting set, brushes and paper from The Tate Modern. He decided to make a little thank your gift and experimented with his new materials.

First he did a wash and let the paint dry. Then he used my copic pen and drew a picture, not really sure what his inspiration was! Then after that he coloured (painted) it in. 

He also had some birthday money so other goodies he treated himself to were a load of Horrible History books, loom bands, souvenirs from the different places we visited - mostly books or notebooks and the such like. He wanted a Harry Potter wand but at 49GBP I had to veto it. I feel that the HP shop at Kings Cross was sooo overpriced. 

He had fun though and plenty of great souvenirs!

How a change of medium can encourage creativity

We do painting quite often but I admit we tend to stick to acrylic but the other day we got out the water colours. We started off by practising some different techniques such as blending the colours as we painted in circles.

We also tried sprinkling salt of the wet paint to see what would happen

Then Ebi-kun decided he wanted to paint an actual picture, he is really proud of this one. He says..

The blue is the mountains and the red is the sunset sky and the white at the top of the mountains are the clouds hanging around (like the ones we saw in Nagano Mommy) then I used salt on the red to get a nice cloud effect.

Changing the medium also seemed to change the subject for the painting so if your kids or yourself even seems to be stuck in a rut, try swapping what you work with for something new and see what happens.

magic colour mixing

Magic Colour Mixing 

We have done this a couple of times but used a brush to mix the colours and well, it wasn't very successful. This time I found some pipits so we could drop the coloured paint into glass jars with water and it worked much better. So much that BabyEbi declared that it was magic, which of course, it is!

You will need:

3 glass jars
tray to work on
jug for pouring water
red, blue and yellow water colour paint, diluted with a little water
pipits for each colour of paint
clean up cloth
and probably paper to do some painting afterwards.

Babyebi set out the three jars and filled them about 1/3 with water.

Then we practised using the pipits for a bit before I bought out the paint. We talked about each colour then I asked him which colour he wanted to add first. "Blue" so he did and then before he added the red I asked him what colour the water would be he said blue so when it turned purple he was amazed.

We continued until he had mixed purple, orange and green and then he wanted to do it all again. The third time we did it I drew some squares on a postcard for him to fill in, like a maths equation so he painted in the boxes red + yellow = green.

When we talked to my mom on the computer later in the day he could show her what he had been doing and was explaining how the colours mixed together made a new magic colour.




Of course afterwards we had to do some painting using the pipits, lots of fun and lots of mess!

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