Unplug your kids - colour

For colour, I started with the bright idea of making up the thicker powdered milk paint I mentioned last week, putting the three primary colours in bags and letting Wombat experiment with mixing them. Here he is mixing up the red. (Unfortunately, the thicker milk paint resulted in the same pastel effect that I get from cornflower, though it did have a great texture. I've still got a few more ideas on different things to try.)


The problem was, I didn't have any ziplock bags of a suitable size... so I used plastic lunchbags... and they broke, almost immediately.


Not to worry - we were prepared for a mess! We went ahead and mixed the blue and yellow the same way.

Then, we started to swirl on the newspaper. I showed Wombat how blue + yellow made green, blue + red made purple and red + yellow made orange.


"Great!" he said. "But I want to make brown!" So he did... and painted a wombat with pawprints all around it.


Wombat was ready to stop there, but I reminded him that all the paint we had mixed was going straight in the bin with the newspaper unless he wanted to use some more of it to do pictures with. Thus inspired, he went on to do some nice colourful swirly-whirling.



It has been super-hot this week, and we have been spending a lot of time inside, so our colour-projects didn't stop there.

We had recently taken the Christmas cards down from their ribbon in the kitchen and they were sitting in a pile on my desk. Normally, I keep them with the vague intention of sticking them in a scrapbook, which means I have many guilt-inducing boxes and bags of old cards lying around. In a moment of decluttering freedom, I handed them to Wombat with a pair of scissors to practice his cutting. He spent a lovely THREE hours, cutting them into little pieces. When I noticed how careful he was being, selecting and cutting around particular images, I decided to take the project one step further. I gave him an A4 size piece of contact (adhesive) plastic to stick them on. When he finally got tired of cutting and arranging his pieces (making sure none of them touched each other) I finished off the project by cutting little tiny pieces to fill in any gaps, making a very colourful tiled mosaic. (Wombat and I had fun working out the 'jigsaw' puzzle of where the little pieces fit best.) When we were satisfied that we couldn't fit anymore in, I stuck another piece of contact paper over the top and we taped it to the window where the sun could shine through it.


You'll have to excuse the lack of photos of the making of this masterpiece as the primary artist was enjoying working in the nude!

And no, we didn't stop there... we also got very colourful playing with the kaleidoscope Wombat got for Christmas. I was amazed to find that I could take photos by lining my camera up with the eyepiece. Here are some of my pics arranged in a (very quick) montage!


Next week's unplugged project is float.