Squeegee Painting

This process art activity was so much fun! For those of you new to reading my blog, I absolutely love process art - art which emphasizes the process of creating rather than the finished project. It allows kids to explore, make mistakes, and have an experience while they are creating. There is no prescribed product to make at the end,although we often turn our process art into various animals, shapes, or decorations, as we did with this one.

I saw the idea for squeegee painting here:  https://www.hellowonderful.co/post/SQUEEGEE-PAINT-EASTER-EGG-ART/#_a5y_p=6231668

With Easter right around the corner, I knew we had to try it out. (Yes I am weeks late getting this blog post done. That's life with a newborn!!)

Supplies: thick paint, white paper, roll of butcher paper (or something else you can put underneath the white paper in case there is a mess), a squeegee, painter's tape

To get started, I rolled out the butcher paper and taped it to the table. I used this to catch any mess we made with the squeegee. Normally, I have a thin plastic table cloth for when we do art, but I needed something perfectly flat for this. Then I taped the white paper down to the butcher paper using the painter's tape. 

I ended up having to add more tape to each corner of the white paper, so I would recommend taping the four corners and not the top and bottom like I did.

For our first attempt, Peanut and I squeezed drops of paint all over the page.

Then we took the squeegee and dragged it down the page, starting at the top and going all the way to the bottom in one swipe.

Although it looks pretty cool, it wasn't really what I had in mind, and it didn't look at all like what I had seen on the blog I found the idea on. For the next attempt, we put all the paint at the top of the page.

Then, the same as the first time, we dragged the squeegee from top of the page all the way to the bottom.

This turned out way better! We did all the rest of our pages this way.

I just loooove the way this looks. I have no idea why, but the paint didn't mix together at all on the paper (I assume because of the squeegee?) and it just created these perfect lines! We tried all different combinations of colours and patterns. Peanut (who is 3) is just ready for very basic ABAB patterns, and art is a great place to explore these.

We left the papers taped down as they dried. When we peeled off the tape, the paper immediately curled up, and I had read about this problem on a few blogs. I tried putting the finished art under some heavy books for a day or so, but it didn't seem to help. I read that some people iron their pages when this happens, but I try not to iron if I can avoid it. Let me know if it works though!

As I mentioned above, this sort of art, process art, is about playing and exploring with all the materials and what happens during creating time. So it would be perfectly fine to just hang these wonderful masterpieces on the wall. But, since it's Easter, I decided to cut them into eggs to decorate our house.

I printed off some Easter egg templates to use to trace... because I want it to be perfect. A normal person might just cut out an egg shape and that's okay. It's not me :)

I traced and cut out a whole bunch of eggs. I think they look amazing!! The stripes look so sharp and I think Peanut chose excellent Easter-y colours.

In addition to putting some of these beauties up on our wall, we shared them with Peanut's grandparents and aunts and uncles.

I will definitely be doing this squeegee art again. It's easy and looks so amazing!

Mar