April 2011

Glittery Collage with Acrylic Gloss Medium

Have you used gloss medium before? It’s a clear acrylic paint that is great for sealing two-dimensional projects. I was cleaning out the laundry room and came across an old bottle of acrylic gloss medium and varnish. Have you ever used this stuff? It’s awesome! It’s essentially glue wrapped up in a paint bottle, and [...]

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Rolled Easter Egg Painting

When my daughter was about 2 1/2, her very favorite art activity was rolling paint-coated marbles all over sheets of paper. We made Rolling Rock Paintings with smooth rocks and Spooky Marble Spider Webs for Halloween. With Easter coming up, I was inspired to make something fun with the plastic eggs that consume dollar stores across [...]

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Abstract Recycled Prints

Back between my careers as a movie costumer and middle school art teacher, I was once a printmaker. Anyone else have a circuitous career path like that? In any case, I have an enormous passion for making all sorts of prints. While my daughter and I have made handprints galore, we’ve printed from sink mats, and stamps [...]

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Looping Twisties through Paper

Today I’m so excited to share that I’ve been invited to write a guest post for one of my favorite blogs, Not Just Cute. Sooo, bonus for today is that there are TWO TinkerLab posts for your enjoyment. Hoorah! The Not Just Cute project will take you outdoors to make a Book of Textures, which is [...]

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Idea Roundup: Tinkering

Do you think children should learn how to use hammers and nails? Power tools? Glue guns? And how do you feel about open-ended exploration of art materials? This week’s roundup brings you some big ideas on tinkering, creating opportunities for child-directed art, and free exploration at the art table. And as a bonus, I found [...]

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Growing Big Ideas

“Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters.” -Kevin Kelly, Futurist and Author of What Technology Wants We had a big pile of CD cases, just waiting to be repurposed into…something! BioColors paints are known for their plasticity (they don’t crack like tempera), and I thought it we could [...]

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Holi Colors

Stanford throws the biggest Holi festival celebration in the Bay Area, and we were lucky enough to join in the fun this weekend. In India, Holi marks the beginning of spring and it’s celebrated by covering friends and strangers with bursts of powdered colors. It’s also a day when enemies turn friends, which I can [...]

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