Do you ever find yourself needing just a safe, inexpensive way to play?
With everything going on in the world right now, it can be hard to go places. We can create fun at home by creating in our home.
This past week, I found myself analyzing the fall, plans, what to do, how to move forward and it was all real heavy when you mix in COVID-19. I bought some notebooks and just started painting for no reason other than I needed too. It was a safe place for me to play, experiment and enjoy the creative process.
“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” -Neil Gaiman
With back to school shopping happening, composition notebooks are only about $0.50 each right now. What a cheap canvas! I bought eight notebooks, gave them a quick spray paint to have a blank canvas and got started just brushing them with big bold strokes of acrylic paint.
I played with colors mixing, making subtle blends, and big bold blends. It was so fun and satisfying to squirt paint directly onto the notebook and to just start brushing and watching that paint move. I played with directions, pressure of the brush, and the amount of paint. It was therapeutic to play with colors I love and stretch myself with new colors.
I loved having eight notebooks to do at once. It allowed me to keep going and not having to wait long periods for a base coat to dry before I painted more. Once all eight of my first coats on the journals dried, I came back and added some more concrete brush strokes on top of my abstract blends.
I loved picking contrasting colors and create movement that went against the other brush strokes. The final step was stamping some circles and squirting some runny paint on top. The mix of all these colors, layers, and different techniques blended together to create some fun abstract notebook covers.
What do you think? Will you pick up some composition notebooks next time you are at the store? I had so much fun creating these covers that now I am continuing on in them! I love art journaling and after leading some art journaling workshops at the beginning of quarantine, I realized one of my favorite parts of journaling is creating base coats like these.
Doodles, words, collages, poems, paintings, and special notes look amazing on top, but they are also pretty fun just like this!
Have you art journaled? If you haven’t, you may just love it. It is one of my favorite ways to rest and process the world around me!
Do you have a student a little nervous to walk back into a new school year? Maybe painting their notebooks for school might help in the excitement and also open up an opportunity for you to talk and process it all together.
I hope you can find sometime for YOU to create, breath and rest, as you also process the world around you! We are in this together! If you try these paint techniques on some inexpensive notebooks, I would love to see them! Please find me on social media!
Instagram: @ericadeuel
Facebook: @spoonfulofimagination
#spoonfulofimagination
Do you love recycling trash into treasures as much as we do!?
The first step is to collect your soup cans. We have gotten in the habit of just saving all our soup cans, so when a project idea arises, we are ready with cans on hand. I take the paper wrapper off our soup cans and run them through the dishwasher with our dishes to get clean. Once you have your dry cans, you are ready to create! We spray painted our cans white to have a nice matte base coat for this project. 
While the tin cans were drying, we collected our spray paint cans and filled a bucket with water. For each can, we choose two different spray paint colors. We added one color at a time.
The can comes out of the water looked marbleized and super fun! After you get the hang of it, you can play with how much spray paint you spray on top of the water to create a more thick or less thick look on your can. We had so much fun doing all four of our cans that we prepped!
After the cans were dry, we used ours to hold art supplies. You could do the same or turn it into something else! A wind chime, flower pot, vase, or candle holder are fun ways to use your new canister too. 
You can personalize this craft using colors that fit your taste or the size can that fits your need best.
How fun are those!? We think they look like they belong on shelves in World Market or Anthropologie. We found some white candle sticks that make the colors pop even more, and we are going to use them as Christmas presents for family this year!
If you paint or have a child that likes to paint, you probably have gone through some paint bottles, right!? For years and years, I have just thrown these little bottles out when they seem to be empty. Now that we have an 
My family uses essential oils, so we have these little 
for mixing oils up. I used them to suck up water/paint mixture from the bottle to drop on a wooden sign. The results were stunning and mesmerizing to watch a fluid art abstract piece come to life. The best part, this was a practically free project. As our studio has been asked to come into our local schools to complete art projects, we try to come up with amazing projects for not a lot of cost. This was the perfect project for just that. Watch how this project came to life through a group of 5th-grade students and then can follow the steps and create your own.
In the classroom, I stapled on a pipe-cleaner and twisted it up to allow the students to fill it with beads. This added a nice fun texture and hanger to make our wood pieces into hangable signs. You don’t have to do this step to your pieces, but I am a sucker for several textures in my projects.
This project is all about the process. You can’t totally control what your piece will end up looking like, which takes some of the stress of it being “perfect” away. I encouraged the students I was working with to do small drops at a time. Some of the bottles may be more watered down than others. By starting with small drops you can watch as colors blend together on their own to make new colors.
Another technique is you can slightly tilt these signs or even stand them up to watch as the paint colors blend and mix to make a stunning abstract piece!
I don’t think you can ruin this project. Often students thought they were done and then they would add one more color. At this point, it is usually when it became more stunning. As the signs dried, some of the paint colors would shift and sort out a little. So fun!
We went back and sprayed a 
 on top of our signs, once they were dry. I use a gloss spray that adds a shine and helps them to look finished and more professional. We talked about how you could use this abstract painted piece as the backdrop to then paint a message on top. Maybe to say a phrase or inspirational word like “courage”.
I love how no matter how many times you do this project, no two signs will ever be the same. Depending on the colors you use and how your paint swirls and mixes together…each piece will be unique. This was such an inexpensive project to implement for a 5th-grade class. They had a blast.
What do you think? Will you start saving your paint bottles? I think these finished pieces make a great gift for a family member. Christmas is coming. You can create some masterpieces with your kids for all those proud grandparents.
What little girl doesn’t love fairies?
Next, come up with your activities and crafts. This was my schedule.
I painted my guests each a little wooden butterfly name tag. They were pretty cute and would make great bookmarks after our event.
As my guests arrived, we started creating our fairy wands. I had attached a painted wood heart to a dowel rod prior to the event and placed them around the table, so every guest could find a seat and have a wand ready to go. It was so fun to watch the kids personalities come out in how they decorated their wand. Some made patterns with the different colors and others tried to get as many sparkly things on it as they could.
Once we had finished with the wands, we talked about fairies. How beautiful they are…how small they are…how colorful they are…what movies they are in, etc. They girls were really animated and excited. It was so fun. We then painted their fairy houses (small craft bird houses) and fairies that they would later use for their fairy gardens.
While we waited for the paint to dry, we had a snack and played some fairy games. We created an obstacle course that the girls had to run through to “earn” their own fairy wings. We also squeezed in a few rounds of fairy-fairy-fly (which was simply a remake of duck-duck-goose). They were excited to run around, and it was fun to see them cheer one another on.
Finally, I showed them an example of a fairy garden creation that my Caleb had made for the party. We talked about how the rocks could be used to create paths, the moss to create a forest, and so on. They were all so eager to start. I then showed them all the materials I had out and they went at it.
Each girl was so proud of her garden. It was so fun to watch them carry them around and keep adding to them but also proudly show them off. I loved watching their imaginations come alive. One little girl thought to sprinkle glitter over her rocks like fairy dust. Another girl made a pool of blue sequins for water. How creative is that!? I have so much to learn from these girls.
Each of their creations was so beautiful and fun. These girls had a blast, and I had a blast helping them have a fun afternoon. At one point I asked my Reagan if she was in her happy place and she smiled proudly and said yes. There is something truly special about creating and hanging with friends.
While the girls waited for their parents to pick them up, the played with their gardens and it made my heart want to explode. I mean seriously. How cute is this!?
You too can host a fairy party and make some girls’ days. The feedback from this event has been so fun.