3 Creative Techniques for Kids and Adults

The autumn is here and with it the long evenings and afternoon bad weather. I really like painting, drawing, paper craft...and since I've had my kids, I had to adjust my crafts to be able to share them with the little ones. So here are 3 techniques perfect for craftsy aduls as well as their kids.

- A4 sheet of high-weight white paper

- another high-weight paper or cardboard for the templates

- tempera paint and water paint

- 4 sheets of A4 color paper

- pen

- sponge for creative techniques – I recommend the finger sponge and the kids have lot of fun with it

- old toothbrush

- glue or also a glue gun

- small twig

- scissors

- ruler

- pair of compasses

Cut out some cloud templates from the high-weight paper or cardboard. Make more than one to have different types of clouds.

Mix the blue that will be your darkest, dip the finger sponge in it, place the template on the white sheet and gently tap around the template. You can experiment with the pressure, just don’t mix the paint with too much water.

The result will be a contour of a cloud.

Add more clouds in several rows.

Now, using a lighter blue, add some taps over the darker blue. You don’t need to use the template anymore and you also don’t need to copy exactly the darker clouds.

Add yet another layer of even lighter blue and in the end just a few taps of really dark blue.

Now we’ll be creating the rain. There will be a 10 cm wide umbrella so we first need to make sure there’s no rain under it. Cut a rectangle from the cardboard, it should be 10 cm wide and as tall as you want your umbrella handle to be (mine is about 3 cm). Place the rectangle to cover the space where the umbrella will be.

Dip the toothbrush in water and then in the paint, you can use more than one shade of blue. Hold the toothbrush over the sheet with the clouds and stroke the brush with your thumb.

As you release parts of it the paint will splash and create the raindrops. Remove the cardboard rectangle.

Let’s make the umbrella. Take 5 cm into your pair of compasses and make a circle on one of the color sheets. The diameter of this circle will be 10 cm. Draw and cut out 16 of these circles.

Fold each circle in half and then again in half.

Spread one side with glue and glue it together with another folded circle as you see in the photos. Keep adding the rest of the folded circles in the same way.

You'll have a pile of folded circles.

Open the unglued sides with your fingers to give them some volume.

And open the umbrella.

Using a glue gun, glue the twig in the back of the umbrella, letting a small piece of the twig be visible on the top.

Glue the umbrella under the clouds.

Draw the umbrella handle with your pen and you can add anything else, of course. Done!