Thursday, August 19, 2010

Marble Painting

Here's an all-ages art project for the dog days of summer (don't even get me started about how much more of summer we have to endure here in the netherworld of Texas). It was field-tested in my house by five children who ranged in age from ten to four, and was a hit all around.

Look! I'm so nice, so generous and giving, that I'm even providing you with a pretty shoddy picture of the artists in action. Bonus: broken screen door in background.



Gather your supplies: paint*, marbles (buy a cheap bag at the craft store), a pad of oversized watercolor paper (use that 40% off coupon; those babies are expensive!), and some sort of tray. If you use, say, 11x14 paper, a cookie sheet with edges might do the trick. We used bigger paper so I directed the Professor to create some huge cardboard trays out of a big box we had lying around. "Your wish is my command, O Queen," he said cheerfully. Or something like that.



Dip your marbles in paint. Plop them on the paper one by one and start rolling and tilting your tray. Or, you can use several marbles all at once and really stir up some craziness!


Ta-Da! Wall Art of which Jackson Pollock would be proud.

By the way, in case you haven't already discovered it, The Crafty Crow is a fantastic place to grab last-minute craft ideas. I use it regularly for my own kids and my Sunday School class; in fact, the marble painting idea was doubtless nabbed there. Hooray for artsy people sharing their nifty ideas!

(* edited: TEMPERA paint)

7 comments:

Stephanie said...

What kind of paint did you use?

~cjoy said...

As Stephanie said, "What kind of paint did you use?"

:D

Julie said...

Me too...what kind of paint do you use? It looks wonderful, you could sell that on ebay! We have a broken screen door exactly like that..waiting for the screen door repair wheels from Lowes...which are hanging in the closet...not helping the screen door any...

Hannah said...

Just tempera paint, folks! Sorry about that. I'll edit the post.

Tamara said...

Very cool project! I love the process and the final product. One of my favorite places to get ideas is: artprojectsforkids.org . It's an elementary art teacher's site full of great projects, many of which copy the style of a well known artist.

Tim said...

Professor here. What impressed me most about this project was how strikingly different each child's work was. I would have guessed they would all have been pretty much the same chaotic mash of lines, but there is actually a lot of individuality and expression available with this method. Note the hand prints. (On the painting, not the walls!)

~cjoy said...

Yeah, we'd probably see some handprints on the walls, too....but this is a definite must for an art project in the near future. :)