Flower Stencil Spray Painting

For today's activity we took place in Tinkerlab's Creative Challenge. This month the material of inspiration was... you guessed it, Flowers.

The idea of these challenges is to take everyday materials and allow children to explore these to unlock the hidden possibilities and utilise them to uncover different potentials. 

I love that at the heart of the challenge is creativity and that the activities are best if child driven.

We have been wanting to try some stencil painting and some spray bottle painting for a while now so we decided, why not combine the 2, add some Flowers and see what we come up with!

Invitation to create

Canvas, fake flowers*, water spray bottle, 3 colours of watered down poster paint chosen by M(3y/o)

(It's winter in Australia and our garden is a little lacking of flowers we could pick so we just used fake ones)

Positioning her flowers where she wanted them

Her chosen design

Purple first

Adding the red

The final colour

We loved how it looked here. It was almost a shame to remove the flowers

The finished piece. 

Handy Tips:

- Simplify this activity by having multiple spray bottles with the paint mix already added. This eliminates the pouring and washing components of the activity

- Extend this activity by having your child mix the paint mixture first and experiment with the amount of water to add. Try some test spraying to see the difference with a thinner and thicker paint mixture and by adjusting the nozzle on the spray bottle.

- This is a great activity to do outside as you don't have to be quite as careful about the mess

- Spray bottle painting works better if the paper/canvas is vertical as you can hold the spray bottle vertical. As we had flowers just sitting on the canvas we did it on the floor. It was more difficult to spray it this way.

- Pride. Making things that look visually pleasing as the end result helps you child feel proud about what they have created

- Talk with your child about what they are doing. This will help them understand the physical and mental processes they are going through as well as giving them the vocabulary to describe it. "Look at how the paint splatters like that"

- Problem solving. Make your child aware of the problem solving involved and ask them questions as needed to help them work out problems themselves, eg. "Why isn't the paint coming out now?", "Is the straw reaching the paint when the bottle is tipped like that?", "How could you fix that?"

Debs :)

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If you have a flower activity feel free to link it up below and don't forget to check out all the different creative ways people have used flowers!