Google+ bakers and astronauts: Homemade Watercolors

12 January 2012

Homemade Watercolors

I have seen a few things here and there about homemade watercolors, and the time came this week to make some - we were desperate for them in the classroom!  I made them at home from a "recipe" that I found on Whole Living.






I had bookmarked the watercolors from One Golden Apple about a year ago, and I still plan to make those ones.  Those are a bit different, using Fantastix (which are sitting in my amazon cart right now), and we'll be trying those soon.  We'll probably use the ice cube tray again, putting a bit of color from a tube into each part of the tray.

Anyway, I made the paints at home and let them set overnight, and then the children used them the next day.  I was almost giddy when I saw the results!








The paints create vivid colors that drew the children in, some of them remaining to paint page after page .  One thing I have noticed with children and watercolors, especially twos and threes, is that they sometimes get caught up in the water aspect, ignoring or using a minimal amount of paint, and they disengage from their painting because they don't see anything on the paper.  With these paints, I showed them to the children at our morning meeting, making a few marks on the paper myself and modeling how I put paint on the bristles by swiping the brush back and forth a few times.  the texture of the paint deep in the pods is almost magic muck-like, acting like a solid until it is penetrated, and then allowing a paintbrush to dig in deep.  As the morning went on, more and more paintings had a bit of a grit to them, adding a bit of texture.


Overall, I love these paints, and I hope that you'll try them out, too, and let me know how it goes for you!  you can get the recipe over at Whole Living.  With small groups of children or classrooms with extra adult hands to work with a small group, I would definitely recommend making these paints with children, perhaps making them in egg cartons so that children can have their own set to take home.  






No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks so much for joining the conversation!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...