Pinterest Project: Toddler Painting

Forest is big into art these days. It seems all he wants to do is draw with his color wonder markers or with his sidewalk chalk. 

Anytime he sees me writing with a pen he tries to snipe it, and marking things off my list at the grocery store results in a tantrum unless I fork over my pen and paper to the toddler tyrant in the cart. One medium we hadn’t tried yet was painting, and when I saw this cute idea on Pinterest I immediately wanted to try it with Forest. 

 

Original Project Source

Since we hadn’t ever painted before, I needed to go out and buy supplies. It made me giddy and reminded me of my back-to-school shopping days. Is there anything more exhilarating than a brand new stack of school supplies? No. Just me? Ahem. 

For this particular project I needed (links included for your convenience) : 

1. Washable Paints in a variety of colors. I went with Crayola since Target was selling 10 2 oz colors for $5.

2. A small thin canvas. Target sells Crayola 2 packs for $5 but you can get them in bulk from other brands for less per unit.

3. A plastic paint tray. 

4. Chunky handled paint brushes for toddler grip. 

4. A plastic drop cloth to protect anything in the splash zone. 

5. Painter’s Tape. 

I started out by forming Forest’s name in tape on the blank canvas. This was harder than it looked and took a few trial and error stabs before I got the scale and form right. I wouldn't advise tracing it in pencil because it'd be hard to get the markings off of the canvas.

The 's' was super hard!

If your kiddo has a very straight lined name with 3 letters ala Kye or Eli (Hey Tal and Abbi!), then this will be a piece of cake, but if you’ve got a Theodore or Harrison on your hands then you may want to build in some extra time for this portion of the project. (Or you could just do their first initial. Or just randomly tape lines across the canvas for more of a cubism effect.) Luckily Forest's name falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum so after 20 minutes, our canvas was primed and ready to go. 

I've never been so glad that we chose the spelling with one 'r' for Forest's name;)

It was a gorgeous day outside so I decided to help Forest channel his inner Monet and we painted outside. I spread out the plastic drop cloth and held it in place with the patio furniture. 

Of course Forest was way more enamored with the drop cloth covering the patio than he was with the canvas with his name on it, but once I brought the paint out he instinctively knew what to do. 

I am *slightly* OCD so I only brought out one color at a time and let him smear that color wherever he wanted on the canvas and then tried to let it dry before moving on to a different color. This kept the painting from turning into a swampy brown mess and also helped me to reinforce the names of colors while he was painting. 

Forest is a funny guy. If you ask him what any letter is he will answer ‘A’. If you ask him how many of something there is he will answer ‘2’. If you ask him what color something is, he will answer ‘red’, but that’s the extent of his color knowledge. Well, while painting he was able to correctly identify green, orange and purple because they were the only color in his dish at any given time, which I think helped the idea stick a bit more. 

Of course, when it came time to switch colors and I’d ask which color he wanted he would exclaim ‘RED!’ as he grabbed the blue/green/yellow/etc. Obviously, we need some more work on the color spectrum.  

He worked diligently on the painting for about 20 minutes before getting bored (or maybe he got fed up with his slightly hovering/uptight/OCD momma, saying- 'hey Forest, this corner of the canvas hardly has any paint, why don't you paint some there...') at which point he started building paint container towers. He is ever our little engineer. 

With some encouragement he finally completed his canvas and we let it dry while we cleaned up a bit. 

I was very happy with how washable the Crayola paints were, especially since Forest decided to paint our patio furniture blue. 

Once it was dry, we had fun pulling off all the tape and I explained that it spelled out his name and went over all the letters. 

Now it’s on display in our kitchen and he will point to it and say ‘art’ or 'painting'. 

It was totally messy but so much fun, and full of great teachable moments. I’m glad that now we have plenty of paint supplies on hand for the next time that inspiration strikes. 

Do you have any crafting ideas that would be great for a toddler?