This painting project is fun and gives satisfying results for pretty much all ages of kids. You can tailor the project to the age of the child by helping them more or less. For instance, if you are doing this with a 4 year old, you will do more of the placing of the tape and showing them how to mix colors. An older kid will be able to do the whole thing themselves. An even older kid could go nuts with adding lots and lots of different tape layers or even different shapes with the tape.
Materials:
- gessoed board or canvas
- acrylic paint
- paint brushes
- blue painters’ tape
- palette or surface for mixing paints
1: Place some tape onto your board primed with gesso (or canvas). We used a pine board primed with 2 layers of gesso and started by placing random tape pieces on the board.
2: Cover it with acrylic paint. Don’t use it straight out of the tube! Take this opportunity to work on color mixing.We used a yellow and and unfortunate looking yellowy-green.
3: Let it dry, peel the tape, add more tape, add more paint. We peeled up about half of the tape pieces, and then made tape stripes this time. You can of course make any shapes you want, loose or straight. We opted for loose stripes with ripped edges.
Blue paint- the color of the tape!
4: Repeat #3. We ripped off the rest of the ‘random’ tape pieces and decided to stick with stripes at this point. We agreed that the green was really ugly, so we left a lot of it uncovered to paint over. (Place next tape stripes mostly over the blue paint to protect it, and your next paint layer will cover over much of the color you don’t like.)
Bright orange this time!
We’re pretty happy with the finished product, but next time we want to try even more layers of stripes. I think limiting the palette to different shades of one color would be really cool. Or try layers of ripped ‘dots’. This project is way open to experimentation.
For more inspiration, check out my acrylic painting techniques resource- 25 techniques!
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