Arts and Crafts: Painting a Water Bottle

I know, I know.  It's been a while since I've updated anything.  Shame on me...  Our family has been pretty busy.  Trying to keep busy has meant running out of time to do anything else, like updating my blogs.  However, I've got more to write about!

I've been meaning to write about my daughter's most recent art project.  We went shopping to find some fun projects, since we haven't been including a lot of arts with our homeschooling.  Crayola has a whole bunch of arts and crafts stuff on the market, which has really inspired my daughter to focus on some art projects!

Now talking my daughter into art is like trying to talk a two-year-old into eating candy.  She keeps telling me she wants to grow up to be an artist, but she hasn't done much with arts.  I'd love to get her into art classes, but they're a bit out of our price range right now.  Instead, we've started looking at projects we could do at home, and the current trend in her interests happens to be painting.

Our first big project was painting a water bottle.  It's one of the Crayola Pop Art Pixies projects.  While normally I don't buy into trendy things, I do like some of the projects they've got.  The particular character this was designed for is an environmentalist.  She's also got another project that's little herb planters.  They have a huge variety of projects, which I think is wonderful!  There's really some good ideas started.

Not having any newspaper to put down, we used one of the shopping bags we haven't yet taken to recycle.  Before we put down the bottle on the bag, my daughter picked out all of her favorite stencils from the bunch and sticking them on just the way she wanted them.  She needed some help getting the first couple of them on smoothly, but I have to admit, getting stickers on without bubbles isn't exactly the easiest of things.  It was nice.  It turned into a project we could work on together.

Watching her with the paint was an exercise in releasing my own sense of perfection.  She'd get too much paint on the brush and it would start to run a bit making some of the colors blend a little.  She wouldn't get enough paint on the brush or wouldn't get the water out enough, so the paint would come out thin and runny another time.  I spent my whole time looking at it and having to remind myself that this project didn't have to be perfect in my eyes.  That's the beauty of art.  I could think the end project looked horrible, but the truth is, if she thought it was beautiful, then it was.  It really opened my eyes to view it with a lack of perfectionism, something I wasn't even able to do as a child.  That's why I never really got much into painting.  I couldn't paint the way I envisioned it, so I gave up.

When all was said and done there were all kinds of crazy blended shapes and the whole thing was painted beautifully.  She added some squiggly waves down a the bottom and continued to work away until there wasn't much more room left to paint.  We decided to set the bottle aside and let it dry.  My daughter wanted to sit there and watch it dry because she was so excited, but we decided to find something else for her to do.  Thankfully it didn't take long at all to dry!

Once it was dry we peeled off the stencils.  I'd advise for anyone who gets these kits to peel the stencils off while the paint is still wet, but I didn't even think of that.  We lost some of the detail when the stencils came off because the paint wanted to peel off all as one.  The two of us worked together to fix some of the stuff that peeled off and then I painted her name and the date on the bottle, that way she would be certain to remember when she did her first big painting project.  We waited again for it to dry.

That bottle has become a total environment saver!  She's used that bottle for every drink she's had since she's made it.  Because it's designed for travel she'll be able to bring it with her as well.  She's able to use it both at the house and on the road.  It's even more perfect because she's able to bring around something she's proud of, an incredible piece of art!

The one thing about this that is disappointing is the lack of art projects for boys!  It seems many of the arts and crafts projects on the market are designed for girls.  This has me frustrated over that whole gender issue again.  Why is it that girls are supposed to be interested in arts and crafts, but boys aren't?  With the number of art programs remaining in public schools, I have to wonder how many boys aren't getting any exposure to art at all!  It's a little disappointing to think of all the boys that might be missing out because they don't market these projects for boys as well.