Snowflake Colour-In Wrapping Paper
Each year I like to produce something as a Christmas ‘gift’ for readers, so this year’s offering is a snowflake colouring sheet which can also be used as a creative wrapping paper. Colour-in wrapping paper is I think amazingly versatile, offering lots of scope for personalisation by both the giver and the recipient. I think they look just as effective partly coloured as fully coloured, or even left plain. This snowflake themed sheet is very simple, and can be made to look very pretty with the addition of glitter glue, or metallic pens for colouring or outlining. Just click on the image and then right click to download it for…
Postage Stamp Christmas Wrap
Christmas is creeping up ever closer, and for the last few years I’ve tried to offer readers a Christmas gift in the form of a seasonal free printable. I think I must have forgotten in 2013, but in 2012 it was 3 sheets of vintage Christmas wrapping paper, and the year before a printable Christmas Tree template to decorate. This year I’ve put together some sheets of Postage Stamp Christmas wrap using the scanner – one of my favourite tools for art making. My Dad has always collected stamps, but he was having a clear out recently and offered me a large number of Christmas stamps that he’d collected over…
Vintage Christmas Wrap
I’m still here! Something terrible hasn’t happened, I’m not ill, and I haven’t got bored and decided to do something else. No the reason why I haven’t managed to write a post for 3 weeks, is simply because of Christmas. I was full of plans for projects and features here this Christmas – it’s such a fabulous time of year for children to be creative, but unfortunately they are all still lying around the house half finished 🙁 So in the meantime I thought I would offer up an early Christmas gift in the form of 3 sheets of original vintage Christmas wrap for you to print off. These come…
Botanical Papers – Part 1
This project uses a humble office scanner and foraged natural materials to produce simple decorative papers with a wide range of uses. As regular readers of Artful Adventures will know, one of my favourite creative tools is our home scanner. I love the way it is simple to use, and creates images which are somehow both 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional at the same time. This project is one of those which started off with us all experimenting with the effects we could get using natural materials on the scanner, as indeed we have in the past, but ended up with me continuing alone, to push some of those ideas further. This…
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…
Decorative Paste Papers & Cards
I came across this technique over at Art for Small Hands where there is a detailed tutorial for undertaking this as a classroom activity. It’s a traditional technique, which, like marbling, was often used in the 18th and 19th centuries for decorating the endpapers of books. As an activity it’s cheap, easy and a lot of fun, but (be warned) it is potentially very messy! It’s also something that is suitable for all ages, with even the youngest of children able to get ‘hands on’. The paste is prepared in advance using rice and wheat flours, water and small drops of glycerine and washing-up liquid. The mixture is cooked and…
