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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Exploring Alternate Canvases ~ Rock Painting

I love the idea of exploring alternate canvases.  The girls have had a great time painting with every possible item under the sun like yarn, spaghetti, forks, bubble wrap, duplos, the list could really go on and on.  But, we always seem to paint on the same thing…plain old paper!
So when I noticed that my sister had a pile of really big rocks sitting in her backyard I had to take a few I knew they would be perfect for the girls to paint on!  I planned on putting them throughout the garden and having the girls paint on them outside, but the mosquitoes are so bad this year that we have not been able to spend much time in our back yard.  Even bug spray does not seem to keep them away.  So we brought the big rocks inside!
First, I scrubbed all of the dirt off of the rocks.  We did this with our art group and each child was able to pick the rock that they wanted to paint on.  Then I gave them a paint palette and set out a bunch of different brushes and they got to work creating.
Emilysrockpainting
Emily decided to paint a rainbow on one side and make a lady bug on the other.
Juliette's Rock PaintingJuliette was happy to swirl all of the different colors around on her rock.
I am still hoping to try this again outside, I think it will be fun to use washable paints and let them keep painting new pictures on the rocks throughout the yard.  Maybe we will be able to get a really big rock/boulder as a canvas too!
What alternate canvases have you  tried having your children paint on?

7 comments:

  1. I just had my girls paint and glitter a lot of rocks outside for their fairy garden. They loved it. I too need to think outside the box with what the girls paint on but we painted on snow with food coloring this past winter and they loved it. I seem to remember you maybe having that on here sometime though.
    Megan

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  2. My kids love to paint on different surfaces too! Fun!

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  3. We've done rock painting too, but sadly our rocks aren't that big! Looks like they had fun!!

    I saw a post from somewhere about painting on aluminum foil. Going to have to try that one too!

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  4. What fun! We did some rock painting last year in school. My daughter had so much fun with it!

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  5. I love this idea! My husband just bought a pile of stones for landscaping, and said that the last bit of the pile was too small to use, so I'll have to ask him to bring a few in so we can try this out!

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  6. I just had my daycare kids do rock painting as well! They had a blast!
    http://daycaresillies.blogspot.com/

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