PINNED IT & DID IT: Blow art monsters

We've done a couple of pins over the past few weeks, and I'm excited to share this one (the other one wasn't so much of a success. And it involved Nutella, who could have seen that coming?)

But for now, I'll show you this fun kids' craft from raisingsparks.com.

Super easy: All you need is paper, tempera paint, water, straws, glue and googly eyes. And some means of getting the paint onto the paper. Lucky for me we have a surplus of medicine squirters, after strepathon 2012.

We used stuff we had on hand, so it was free (well. It didn't require a trip to the store or extra expense. But we did almost use up the tempera pain I bought several years ago.)

To start, you water down tempera paints. The original tutorial said to water it down considerably. I thought I'd watered the paint down too much because it was pretty runny and some of our monsters bled together.

But when I tried a mixture with less water, it really didn't blow much. And it made the paper more wrinkly.

The paper does get really wrinkly. I was disappointed in mine, but now that I'm looking at the picture I had pinned, I realize that her paper is wrinkled too. This would be eliminated by watercolor paper, which is thicker - but I wanted to be able to use things I have on hand.

I dropped paint on their papers and they blew away.

After the paint dried, we got out the googly eyes and Elmer's glue. I put dots of glue on Micah's paper and let him put the eyes on. For Tobin, I put glue on a paper plate and let him dip the backs of the eyes in the glue and then place them himself.

And then I drew on mouths with a sharpie.

The bottom line: The boys LOVED this craft, and both younger boys were able to do it (Luke probably would have enjoyed it too, but he was at basketball practice.)

My only issue was that they both wanted to suck the paint up into the medicine dropper and squirt it out themselves. And I wanted to be in control of the paint. Always a struggle to balance their need for independence and creativity and my need to not have to clean up a disaster area.

But Cute:

You should do this, it's simple, easy and really fun!