Keeping the Kids Busy Day Four

In the last post, I talked about using unusual paintbrushes.  How about trying some printing and stamping with some unusual items today?

Of course you can use the old standby and carve something into half a potato but why not go beyond that?  Try some fruits like an apple or an orange and see what kind of print you get from them.  Or how about a green pepper?  If you cut it in half horizontally, when you print with it, it resembles a shamrock.  Or take a bunch of celery and cut off the stalks (for eating!) leaving a few inches behind at the base.  Stamp with that and you get something resembling a cabbage rose.  Look around for other items in your kitchen that would be great for stamping.  When my daughter was little, she came home with a picture of a snowy scene and the snowflakes falling from the sky had been made by stamping white paint with pieces of Honeycomb cereal.  Grab those rubber bands you use for a paintbrush yesterday and this time wrap them around a piece of wood (or something similar) in random fashion, crisscrossing each other.  Stamp with it!  Have any leftover pipecleaners?  Make them into desired shapes (coils or geometric shapes are easy) and glue them onto a piece of wood, scrap of plastic, or a piece from a styrofoam meat tray and stamp away.  You can do the same with string or yarn.  Or take some of those items and attach them around a cylinder of some sort – an empty pill bottle or toilet paper roll, for example, roll that through the paint and then onto your surface (kind of like those rubber stamp rollers).  You can also cut out shapes from the foam meat trays and attach those to wooden blocks or one of the cylinders or something similar and make stamps that way.  Cut a flat piece from a meat tray and use a pencil to carve a design in it and then use that almost as a lino print.  Raid your kitchen drawers for utensils like whisks and potato mashers and check out what kinds of designs you can paint with them.  Put a piece of paper into a shallow box.  Get some paint on a marble or the wheels of a toy car and roll that around the piece of paper by tipping the box back and forth to create a design.  Stamp with the ends of spools or place them on their side, rolling them through the paint and then onto the paper.  Find some plastic toy animals – how about a dinosaur? – and dip its feet into the paint and then make tracks of footprints on your surface.  Or how about looking at fingerpainting and making hand prints in a new way by encouraging your kids to try to make different shapes from their hands and painting with them that way – you could make a fist and run your knuckles through the paint and then onto your surface.  Or use only your fingertips.  What other items can you and your kids find to paint with?