Arty Pencils
One of the Christmas gifts I made this year, to go alongside a set of Artwork Jotters, were these artwork covered pencils. I was quite pleased with the result, which looked I thought fairly professional, so thought I would share them with you. If at all possible, these are best created using plain wooden pencils as a base, otherwise when you sharpen them, the original colour may peep through beneath. This may or may not bother you, depending upon how much of a perfectionist you are. I just used some unused patterned pencils which I had to hand. You will need: Glue Matt acrylic varnish Brush for Varnish Pencils Decorative…
A Christmas Gift for You
A last minute Christmas post before I sign off for the holiday, and I still haven’t wrapped the presents! Back in June when I took part in Mommy Labs’ Forest Fiesta Blog-hop, I promised to put up some scanner art trees to embellish. Unfortunately I never got round to it, so my Christmas gift is a template for a scanner art Christmas tree on a stand just waiting to be embellished. All you need is some thin card, (we used an empty cereal box) scissors and glue to get started. If nothing else, it might keep the kids occupied for a while over the holiday period! To get your own…
Sweet Treats
One of the nicest, and simplest gifts to give, at any time of year, but especially at Christmas, are homemade sweet treats, whether they be chocolates, sweets or cookies. They’re also something that children can easily help to create. While I wouldn’t describe myself as a great cook, I do have a very sweet tooth, and making this kind of thing as a gift gives me a wonderful excuse to indulge in making some of the gorgeous recipes I come across online. But if you want your gift to look really good, and even more personal, then giving some thought to how your sweet treats are packaged is well worth…
Thumbprint Gift Tags
More arty preparations for Christmas, this time in the form of simple gift-tags made with finger or thumbprints. I love finger and thumbprint art much more than that using hand and footprints, which (with some notable exceptions) I often think can look rather contrived. In contrast I love the simplicity of finger and thumbprint artwork, and the fact that you have to embellish them and add detail to turn them into something else. The robins and penguins were created from a single base thumbprint in black or brown, followed by a finger print on top in white or red. Details such as eyes were added with paint, and legs with…
Snow Paper
Christmas is such a wonderful time for making things and my head has been buzzing with ideas for projects recently – I just wish we had the time to do them all, but it’s also the busiest time of year for Artful Kids, with lots of orders to fulfil, so time is frustratingly in shorter supply than usual. To make sure that I squeeze in some time for creating, two things tend to slip – housework (that’s my excuse anyway) and browsing online 🙁 Our latest project has been making some ‘Snow Paper’ – a really simple thing to do, with lots and lots of different uses afterwards. To begin…
Creative Gift-wrapping
Following on from my last post on creating some Graffiti Giftwrap, I thought I’d look at a few more ideas for some creative gift-wrapping with kids. Of course there are loads of ways you can create gift wrap. The following are just a few ideas: Last year we made decorative paste papers for gift wrapping, We also had a go last year at using cookie cutters to stamp out decorative papers and cards. This can also look good on a standard brown packaging paper background, especially if you use some gold paint. There are lots of seasonal cookie cutters about such as simple stars and Christmas trees, and this makes…
Graffiti Giftwrap
It’s heading towards mid-November already, and I need to start thinking about getting things organised for Christmas. Over the last 12 months or so, I have discovered that I love decorating paper – creating gorgeous effects with paper, paint, crayons, and whatever else I have to hand, so this year I thought it would be fun to create our own giftwrap. I thought creating our own graffiti giftwrap would be particularly fun for the boys to do, so I bought a cheap flip chart pad to use for the purpose. For under £10.00 I got 40 sheets of bright white A1 size paper which is just the right thickness to…
Confetti Shakers
I have to confess, that I wasn’t sure what to call these – they’re not quite sun-catchers, and not really snow-globes, so I decided on Confetti Shakers in the absence of any other ideas. These were born when I accidentally discovered, in one of those ‘Eureka’ moments that you have now and then, that the lid of a Pringles tube, fits exactly onto the lid of a tub of cottage cheese from Tesco (I think other products have the same lids too, mine just happened to be cottage cheese!) My mind of course ran riot with potential ideas of how I could use this discovery (you can see I lead…
Halloween Scanner Art
As the days grow shorter and the weather gets colder, the shops start to fill up with Halloween related products. In the UK this is a relatively recent phenomenon – when I was a child, although we were aware of Halloween, it wasn’t much ‘celebrated’ as such – there were few parties, and no trick or treating to speak of. All the festivities were reserved more for Bonfire Night on the 5th November. For my Scottish husband though, trick and treating was very much a part of his childhood, so maybe it’s more of a Celtic thing in terms of origin? Who knows. Anyway, the range of products now available…
Tie-Dyed T-Shirts
It seems incredible to me that in all my years of exploring arts and crafts, I’ve never actually had a go at tie-dyeing before, but because it looked so easy, I thought it was about time we tried it. Although this activity may seem a little more craftful than artful, after doing so much playing with watercolour, it felt pretty similar, only this time we were using the T-shirts as our canvas! We tried 2 different techniques – the first to create a random effect, and the second to create horizontal white lines. As for the dye itself, we used Dylon’s range of hand-dyes and followed the instructions for making…
Watercolour Spray Inks
Ever since I first heard about watercolour sprays, I’ve been wanting to try them out. The ones you can buy ready-made are I discovered quite expensive, so I decided to create my own using the new powdered water-colour inks I’ve recently treated myself to. That way I can control the dilution I want, mix the colours, and be much more extravagant with them as they are so economical to use. So, I mixed up my inks, and bought some travel sized spray bottles to put them in. There are quite a lot of posts around the internet at the moment for using spray paints with kids, more particularly using trigger…
Collaged Door Sign
This week we found yet another use for all those old comics and magazines we seem to accumulate – creating a collaged door sign. I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by creating a ‘tutorial’ for this as I think it’s pretty self-explanatory really. The base was a piece of foam-board covered with coloured paper. The letters were cut out and glued a little haphazardly (I think it looks better that way) onto a piece of plain white paper whose edges I tore for decorative effect. Overall I’m quite pleased with the finished result…. Alternatively you could glue the letters onto pieces of adhesive magnetic sheet to create…
