Liquid Watercolor Experiments

My daughter can never get enough of experimentation with liquid watercolors and different surfaces. It is neat to see the interaction of the liquid watercolors on all the different textures and how each material absorbs or not.  If you don't have liquid watercolor, food coloring mixed with water can be substituted for this activity.

Materials Needed:

Liquid Watercolors mixed with water

Food Coloring mixed with water

eye droppers

newspaper

paper towels

tissues

napkins

coffee filters

baby wipes

To begin the experimentation, lay down newspaper to protect the table surface. Either water down food coloring or liquid watercolors and place in muffin tins or small containers.  Use the eye droppers to drop color on to different surfaces such as: paper towels, tissues, napkins, coffee filters, baby wipes, newspaper, and more....

Paper Towel Experimentation

Facial Tissue

 Baby Wipes

 Newspaper

What Should We Make With All Our Experiments?

DIY Watercolors

For the longest time I've been wanting to make these DIY Watercolors with my daughter and we finally got around to it and I'm sure glad we did! We got the recipe from one of my favorite blogs: Happy Hooligans....do check this blog out for all kinds of kid friendly ideas.  You can find Happy Hooligan's great tutorial on Homemade Watercolors here.  Keep reading to find out our results of these watercolors and the beautiful paintings we created!

To make these DIY Watercolors you'll need:

4 Tbsp. baking soda

2 tsp white vinegar

1/2 tsp. light corn syrup

2 Tbsp. cornstarch

Food coloring

mini muffin tins or ice cube trays for the paints

First,  mix all all the ingredients together (except for the food coloring) in a big glass measuring cup and pour this mixture into your mini muffin tins or ice cube trays.  I filled them about 1/4 inch full.  Then,  add a few drops of food coloring to each section.  Use a toothpick to mix each individual color.  Wait about  a day for the watercolors to dry.  When using the paint add water just like you would with a watercolor set you would buy in the store.

Here is C having a blast with these watercolors:

One of her GORGEOUS paintings:

Another beauty:

Even Mom had FUN:

Hope you have fun making and painting with these DIY Watercolors!

Glue and Watercolor Painting Experiment

Lately we've been experimenting a little bit with glue, water, and watercolors.  I think whenever you introduce a new element to an art process it always makes it more fascinating and it definitely made it more intriguing for my daughter... who lately would rather be playing outside or doing her own thing.  One of my readers,  Amelia, told me she was going to try adding glue to our Colorful Mud Paintings mixture and I'm wanting to try that myself too.  Keep reading to find out the results of our experiment with glue and watercolors.

All you need for this process is:

white Glue

water

brushes

watercolors 

thicker paper (scrap book paper, tagboard)

To begin, first make a mixture of one part water and one part white glue.

Brush it all over your paper like this 

Then begin painting with water colors over the glue.

My daughter really liked this process.  It gave the watercolor paint texture and the paintings a different look...kind of  a speckled look.  Here is a rainbow by C.

People.

Flowers by Mom.

Flowers by C.

Experimentation and free form art.

This isn't the first time we've experimented with glue: we've painted with salt, glue, and watercolors here and check out our post on Four Ways to Use Glue (besides pasting) here.

What new elements have you added to art processes with children?