Finger Print-Making

Yes, I do mean finger print-making, not fingerprint making. Two different things, and I'll show you what I mean. First though, I apologize for my pathetic lack of posting over the last week or so. My grandpa passed away and that was pretty much all I could think about for several days. Don't get me wrong, Erik and Paisley were cared for as carefully as always, and we played and had fun. I just didn't want to think about taking pictures and typing up posts and all that stuff. I'm ready to get back into real life though, so here we go...
I saw this idea a while back, and even had it on my list of things to try in the next month or two, but on this particular day it just kinda happened without prior planning, and it was really fun. Erik had been begging for days to paint. Any time the cupboard with all our activity supplies got opened up he'd beg and whine and if he managed to get his fingers in there he'd grab a bottle of paint and then try to run away before I could take it away from him. Then, we woke up to this outside (which Erik was SO not interested in playing in), and I decided that maybe it was time for a painting day since I knew we probably would be stuck inside all day.

I plunked Erik into his high chair, put a paper on the tray and squirted some globs of paint onto it with the intention of just doing regular old finger painting. It didn't take long before Erik had used up all the space on that paper and wanted another one. I was just removing the paper and getting ready to put down another one when I remembered this post about Mono-Printing. Instead of giving Erik another paper, I just squirted the paint right onto the highchair tray and let him go at it.

Yay for getting to make a big mess all over the place!

After a minute or two I took a clean piece of paper and let him help me press it down onto his paint creation. I lifted off the paper and viola!, we'd made our first print. We kept this up until Erik was done painting. After almost every print I'd add a little more of at least one color of paint to keep things interesting.

Okay mom, I'm ready to make another print! Hand me that paper.

Erik had a great time, and we got some fun pieces of artwork to display.

For the one with the hand prints, I just held a paper over my hand and told him to give me a high five. His hands were already covered in paint, so we got some great ones.