The Messy Homeschool Mom: Squish Art Monsters

Pinterest is a funny place. No other form of media makes me feel so motivated and so very, very slacker-ish than Pinterest. But I love it, so I take the good with the bad. My favorite things to pin for the kids are craft and science projects. So you will be seeing a lot of those here.

This is what we did today:

Disclaimer: I am a TERRIBLE photographer. I apologize in advance.

So I was wanting to dive into a messy project with the kids, and I found this pin:

I love paint, and we have a ton of it. And I really liked the "Monster" decorations after the paint part. I like doing projects that are about the process, and to be truthful just squishing the paint would leave me bored and uninspired. The creative aspect for me was in creating the faces.

For this project we used:

Card stock
Tempera Paint
Paint Brushes
Glue
Pom poms
Ribbon
Neon index cards
Fabric scraps
Jewels
Markers (to draw pupils on our eyeballs)
Buttons
Stickers

The how-to of the paint part seemed simple. Fold-Drip-Squish-Decorate.

Fold a piece of cardstock in half.
Drop/squeeze paint onto one half, and then brush to create half of the monster
Squish the two halves together until the paint transfers and unfold
Viola, a monster blot ready to be decorated!

And it was that simple.

Sort of.

We learned a few things along the way.

#1. Do not let the four year old drop the paint onto the paper. (There is fun messy, and there is excessive messy-that definitely fell into the latter category.) Results:

Oops! And when squished the paint oozed out the sides everywhere. Which leads me to:

#2. Leave a border around the edge of the paper. And be judicious when applying paint. The above page, when folded and squished looked ok, but not stellar. And not using black probably would have helped.

#3. Don't focus on the brush part too much. Baby Girl was very focused on getting her "half" to look perfect, and it kinda dried out in between times.

Her first try:

#4. You may be able to get away with not using a brush at all! Buds had fun doing this project, but he wanted help with his last couple. We found that dropping the paint and then doing very minimal brushing worked the best.

This was what we came up with doing that:

#5. Don't let the baby paint by himself while helping the bigs.

This is why:

But his picture came out cool!

We let all of them dry for an hour or so, and then I gave the kids some random crafty stuff and some glue and let them go to it. Bubba was sleeping, so I worked on his picture. Baby Girl and Buds had so much fun creating their monster faces. They came out so great!

Note: Glue falls into the same category as paint. Buds grabbed the bottle while I was distracted and we had a disaster. To combat this problem I did what my mom did, I made a little paper "boat" and put some glue in it. He dipped his pieces in that and then stuck them to the picture. Worked like a charm - as long as I was paying attention.