Black Glue Watercolor Painting

Older Toddler+

When I saw Black Glue Watercolor Painting here, I knew it would be something S would enjoy immensely.  I also really liked the definition the black glue gave to the whole picture.  

It's very easy to do, and S is now obsessed with it.  Ironically, if you give her a sheet of paper and watercolors with no directions she'll paint for about 5 minutes.  But she spent forever on this project and continually requests it. 

You'll need a bottle of glue and some black acrylic paint (I think you could use washable paint instead, but you might have the black bleed into the watercolor that way - I'm not sure).

Add about 3 big squeezes worth of black paint and then shake.  Honestly, the hardest part of the whole project was the shaking to mix the glue and the paint.  I would be lying if I didn't say I was concerned that my arm was going to fall off.  I also seriously considered jumping in the car and bringing it to Home Depot to have them mix it on one of those paint can shaking machines.  Anyway, be sure to allow a generous amount of time to mix the two.  It might even be worth taking all the glue out, stirring in the paint, and pouring it back into the container.  It just depends on how stubborn you are, I guess.   :)

Draw your scene in pencil on watercolor paper.  The glue comes out a bit thick, so the larger the picture, the better.  S drew an adorable little snail at the bottom there with a cute little face, but the black glue came out thick enough that I couldn't represent that detail well.  If your child is very young, you can draw something for them to paint.  The more details and areas the better.  I drew S a turtle (not pictured) with lots of detail on his shell.

 S also drew "Confetti" - a cat that she draws often (who I love).  Yes, he is wearing a plaid sweater.  How awesome is that?  He also has some pieces of cat food (on the left) and a cat toy (the little cat face down on the bottom right).  

Unless you have an older child, I'd say the next step is a parent-only one.  It takes a lot of hand-eye coordination to steadily squeeze the glue to outline the pencil drawings.

S looked on while I did this part.  Doesn't it already look so cool?  It does take a full 24 hours to dry, which I'd told S up front.  I put the pictures some place she could reach and she'd periodically check them and report back to me on how the drying was going.  :)

The next morning, it was time to paint!  We started out using Discount School Supply's Colorations watercolors and I have to admit - it was the first time I've been disappointed in one of their products.  Their watercolors were pretty terrible - they were very, very faint.  :(  So we switched to Crayola (pictured below) and the results were much more vibrant.  

We also added in some of Discount School Supply's Colorations Liquid Watercolors (which are amazing, unlike the regular watercolors!) as an easy way to get the shades/colors we didn't have.

After painting the fish scene, she wanted to play for a bit before coming back and painting Confetti the cat. 

We talked about how picking one color for the background of a painting makes the thing you drew stand out, so she decided to paint the background of Confetti's picture all orange (with Liquid Watercolors).

Such a fun project with a beautiful product!  

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.