Watercolor painting

Freya would be absolutely thrilled if we had painting or play dough time every day. Today I broke out the water colors and gave her a little lesson.

Items you need:
paper towel
small glass of water
water color paint box
assortment of brushes
thick paper card stock will work for this if you can't find water color paper

set up your table as shown.

Make sure that you wet your paper before painting and also your water color paints. I usually just run both under the tap water quickly.

First talk about how we dip our brush in the water, dab it on the paper towel then put it in the paint box. This will help to keep your paint box from quickly becoming brown.

Then they can paint away. Usually when they start they like to push the brush down and scribble like they would with crayons. It is pretty important to point out that we pull the brush instead of pushing the brush so that we don't ruin the bristles.

Then to change colors, we always put the brush back into the water, dab it on the paper towel then get our new color.

It may seem complicated but my 3 year old Freya was very happy to do each step. And she was delighted when I pointed out that if we pull the brush we can make lines!

We haven't talked much about what happens when we mix the colors. That is next!

My favorite book about painting is Paint Day, Bing! We love this because he paints with water colors and they we're always reminding him Don't Spill the water Bing! I love how the water gets dirtier and dirtier at each page.