Valentine’s Hearts

We had a little reunion of some of our old art group members (did I ever even post anything about that…hmm, maybe not) and it was a rockin’ wild time.  Eleven kids, two babies and seven adults in our tiny house, plus paint, toys and a short dance party = good fun.  We did an easy little project with coffee filters cut in the shape of hearts colored with liquid watercolors.  The kids and I tried this out earlier in the week, twice actually.  The first time we diluted the liquid watercolors with water and it made very pale pink hearts.  The second time we used full strength watercolors and the hearts were much more vibrant.  We taped them up in the window, next to the coffee filter snowflakes a la The Artful Parent.  All in all the house looks very festive, especially since there is still a good bit of pink streamer from the big girl’s birthday above the window.  Here are a few shots from today, didn’t get any action shots because I was too busy trying to keep the watercolors off the carpet as much as possible.

I kept the paint choices to two colorways — cool and warm. I divided the paints in a plastic egg carton cut into two palettes of six sections each. We used sponges to dab, brushes to paint, and eye droppers to drip. The sponges were the most effective with the age group we had (2-4 yrs) — some of the younger ones were dropper-ing huge puddles onto their work. Luckily I had put down some of the brown contractor’s paper, which is surprisingly absorbent.  The only problem I had was finding a place to dry all of the work — we had one particularly prolific painter this morning.  Our “studio” is on the back porch with the cold weather we had to work inside, so there was brown contractor’s paper on the kitchen floor and brown cardboard boxes around the dining room table where we worked.  (Oh, and sorry for the pictures, I need to be less lazy and use the better camera instead of my phone.  Maybe next time, eh?)