Rainbow Collage + freestyle clouds

I got this idea from The Imagination Tree. Great blog with tons of inspiring posts. I love how she emphasizes the importance of play in her blog, and her kids are beyond adorable! You should check out her posts about Discovery Boxes and Treasure Baskets, those are my favorites.

Moving on, I got the idea to do a Rainbow Collage from their, and I wanted to share my results.

Remember this messy looking rainbow painting from my post The Sad Life of a Poor College Student.

Well there WAS  purpose for that sad looking thing, and it was this rainbow collage! It's a pretty self-explanatory project; basically I painted it - cut it out - spread some glue out on one color at a time - gave my kids a variety of objects of that color to place on the rainbow. I did this over 4 days, 2 colors of the rainbow each day + one more day for the clouds. I skipped indigo...eekk! 

You can see a few misplaced colors, not a big deal, I am actually surprised it came out as correct as it is! This is all due to Talen. During her turn if she noticed any misplaced colors from one of the other children she had to fix it! Haha it made me laugh, and I was very proud of her color recognition. I used foam stickers [their favorite] sparkle balls, paint chips, feathers, & pipe cleaners. Lots of texture and fun in this project.

We also made clouds to go underneath our rainbow. I was going to have a coffee filter covered in cotton balls with a little glitter sprinkled over for this project. Sounds pretty right? Well my plans changed the night before when I read this post about Art Placement at Art 4 Little Hands. Another great blog, and inspiring post. Unfortunately letting go of control is not my strong point! You're supposed to leave some art supplies out when kids aren't paying attention and let them come to it on their own time, and do with it whatsoever they chose. Well I cheated a little bit. I had my kids sit at the table and handed them these art supplies.

Some gluey coffee filters

And a coffee filter with a few cotton balls, white pipe cleaners, and silver glitter.

Sensing a theme? AHH I'm a terrible art teacher, this is hardly giving them free reign over their creation process. It was a baby step though, a very small first step, but progress from my usual reign of control. I also gave them paintbrushes so they could have something else to utilize if they wanted. Here is what I got...

 Bre dipped her paintbrush in the glue and painted her hand with it, not how I had intended BUT this was not about my wants, but hers and a gluey hand is what she wanted =] 

Then dipped her hand in the glitter. This is Bre's final product. It sure looks pretty.

 After decorating her hand, she decided to add a couple cotton balls and pipe cleaner to her coffee filter.

This might have been with the help of Talen though...

Here is Talen's work in progress. She went at it like she was a cloud making professional!

Here is her finished product. She finished before everyone else, so decided to lend her cloud making talents to help her friends. No kidding, I guess she thought because I wasn't taking control, she should. She went around the table 'helping' them put their clouds together.

I saw alot of smearing the glue around with the paintbrush before adding anything, I guess they learned that technique from me.

 I LOVED Emery's idea to dip her brush in the glitter, then put it on the paper.

 Unfortunately this process is time consuming and after a while when she saw her friends finishing, she decided the dump method would suffice.

Pretty, no? 

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