Easel painting

As much as my family enjoys all the cutting and gluing and colouring and drawing stuff that we do, there's something incredibly creative and delightfuly open ended about big sloppy pots of brightly coloured paint. The kids light up when the paint pots come out, especially if they have a canvas that is bigger than they are! We don't have any proper kid easels or anything like that, so there are a number of hodge podge solutions to this and they seem to work well enough that I feel no need to go out and find a proper easel for them.

There are a few ways that we try to accomplish sloppy paint play with minimal paint on stuff it's not supposed to go on. The favourite is using the make shift outdoor painting area. We picked up a cheap iron wall decoration thing from Goodwill that I think must have been used to hold glass containers with candles in at some point in it's life. It's had somewhat of a social demotion going from what I can only imagine was a gloriously classy diningroom wall to nailed to our fence and made to hold pots of kid paint. It works a treat though. We also picked up some cheap big bits of chipboard and secured them to the fence at the top with string tied to hooks that were screwed in. This means that we can take them in when it rains (but we've forgotten a few times and left them out and they still seem ok). Strips of butcher's block paper get covered in paint by the kids and then left to dry in the garage. It's all lovely and messy and fun. I strongly suggest giving it a go.

Of course, sometimes the weather is not so accomodating, or it's the depths of winter and it gets dark early, so in that situation we have resorted to using sheets of cardboard taped to the back of kitchen chairs and a towel on the floor.

It might seem silly to go to such lengths to let the kids paint when they want to, but I can't help myself, because the artwork that comes out of these experiences is just so lovely and full of energy and imagination. The pictures below were painted by my four year old.

If you've visited my blog before then you probably have noticed that the kitchen, where a lot of the crafting takes place, is covered in artwork by the kids, but it does make it's way into all the rooms in the house, even our bedroom. I really do love it that much. Part of me hopes that the kids will never totally give up the abstract types of pictures they make at this age. There's something very special about them.

When we have a huge number of kids then we get out the old bedsheets and they paint them on the floor or strung up on the outside of the house. You need to weight the bottom of the sheet out away from the wall, so that you don't end up with paint soaking through onto the wall, although with kid paint it comes off easily with a hose.

We always mix the store bought paint with a squirt of dish soap and an extra drop of water to make it go further and it also makes it easier to wash out of clothing too. After the fun has been had painting the bedsheet then you can just throw it in the washing machine and paint it again some other time.
I have to say that although we don't have proper easels, the school style no spill paint pots are something I would not be without. The older kids are fine with old yoghurt pots, but the two year olds really need that anti-spill design because I like them to be able to paint with minimal adult intervention and if one child tries to grab a pot of paint from another at any point then no one ends up wearing it, which is nice.
Often covering the table in butcher's block paper is enough to keep them happy too. We got our roll from Costco well over a year ago, but when it started running low we couldn't find any more there. Smart & Final stocks different widths and weights of butcher's block paper rolls though and they all hover at around $30, which is a bargain for well over a year's worth of paper (probably much longer if you don't have a bazillion children using it every other day like we do).

Messy sloppy paint is by far the best fun to have when you don't have a specific craft lined up! The kids get so much more of a kick out of it than they do from those teeny little water colour boxes.