Decorating Easter Eggs!

I had hoped to get this post up before Easter, but it just didn't happen. As I type this, Erik is on day 7 of the stomach flu, so things have been not so fun around here lately. 

I wanted to do something fun to celebrate Easter with the kiddos, and decorating eggs just seemed like the perfect thing. We used this idea and, armed with some watercolors for Erik and baby finger paint for Paisley, we went after it with gusto. I do have to mention that this is Erik's first time using watercolors and (to my knowledge) this is Paisley's first time painting.

Never used a paint brush before, so it took some figuring out. 

 I really wanted Erik to practice the fine motor control needed to hold a brush (and someday a pencil), so I hit the dollar store and picked up some cheap watercolors. FYI: bad idea! Apparently water colors are one of those things you just shouldn't be cheap on. As soon as we added water to these they started to look more like milk with a smidgen of food coloring in them than like brightly colored paint. They drank up the water super fast which only  made them more and more pale as we worked with them. Moral of the story, buy the good stuff. It only cost a buck more.

 Paisley was really not sure about sticking her fingers in the goo on her tray. It took her a few minutes to warm up to the idea, but she eventually got the hang of it. Sometimes new sensory experiences just take some getting used to.

 Paisley chose to go with more of a splatter effect than a brush stroke. It actually turned out pretty neat looking, although it meant we didn't get any cute little finger prints anywhere.

 Figuring out the idea of using the brush was hard on Erik. He really just wanted to use his fingers. It didn't help that the paint barely left a mark so he couldn't tell that the brush was doing anything. His whole paper ended up soaked in a mixture of wimpy paint that just blended into a grayish mess on his soggy paper.

 When we finished, I hung the eggs up to dry. I wanted them to be out of Erik's reach but somewhere that any drips would be easy to clean. Since we'd chosen to do tape resist painting, the eggs already had something to hang them with.

 When the paint dried, I took the eggs down and peeled off the masking tape. Paisley's eggs turned out really cute with nice vibrant colors. The flour/water mixture of the paint left a really neat texture as it dried. Erik's egg, on the other hand, was just sad. The water was just too much for the paper and it came apart as I peeled back the tape (even though I'd waited until it was dry), and the color was almost non existent. Now we know that watercolor is not the right medium to use when doing tape resist art.