A Day with the WannaBees - Playing with Paint

After our awesome guild program with Nancy Graham last week, the WannaBees decided we wanted more playtime with paint.  Lynn was gracious enough to let us make a mess in her kitchen, so we trucked in fabric, paint, brushes, sponges, scissors, leaves, vines, styrofoam trays, a hot glue gun, and pieces of plexiglass.

Ben showed off some cool Magic Stamp, which you can heat with a hair dryer, press a design into, use it to stamp, and then heat it up to "erase" the image and use it again.  Amazing! 

He created several textures, swirls, and other designs to practice with.

I had an idea about using photo transfer, the Skydyes technique, AND stamps to create an image.  I started with some pictures of The Bear that I had pulled out for the various graduation activities and printed them onto my favorite photo fabric sheets.  Then I used the translucent dyes and sprayed the photos a bit. 

I used some clipart for inspiration, and cut out a Polaroid picture shape from a sheet of Fun Foam.  I also cut a camera shape with a round opening.  I mounted each of these on a piece of scrap plexiglass that Lene's husband had donated to the cause. 

 

The clear plexi allows you to see exactly where you are placing the stamp.  In some cases a general idea is fine, but when stamping over a photo you want a little more precision.  

Lene was intrigued by Nancy's leaf prints and used that as her jumping off point.  For some reason, I didn't get a great shot of her finished product, which is a shame since they came out great.  She used some strawberry leaves that made gorgeous impressions.  

 My favorite project of the day, though, was Lynn's.  She was looking for a project to do with her three girls over the summer.  She has a stash of brightly colored, inexpensive t-shirts that she wanted to print on. 

She found some clipart and printed it out, stapled it to the Fun Foam, and cut it out.

She rolled the paint onto the stamp with a brayer...

 

...laid the stamp onto the t-shirt and pressed with paper towels.  These help absorb any paint that oozes out from under the stamp.  

Voila! 

Then she used some scraps of the Fun Foam to make this adorable paw print stamp, and used hot glue to mount it on a piece of wood.

How cute is that? 

And for one more shot of gratuitous cuteness...the inspiration for the dog art:

Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola!

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