Mosaic painting

Hi, there!  This seems to be the winter that doesn't want to end.  A lot of us are still stuck with snow covering every inch of outdoors, or weather so cold that our skin will freeze off if we try to go outside.  We thought we'd post another craft that we can do indoors with the little ones to try to take their minds off being stuck indoors for yet another day or two, or ten.  I saw this on Pinterest about a month ago, and I thought, "I seriously need to find a tutorial for this!  These look so amazing!"  I looked for a couple of tutorials, and I think I was using the wrong buzz words because nothing popped up that even looked like what I wanted. SO, I winged it, and we're off on another crafting adventure here in our house, complete with paint and glitter!  For this project, you will need:

• A canvas surface...I got mine in a two pack at Hobby Lobby
• Some paints...I just went and picked out some pretty acrylic colors in the paint area
• Glitter
• Some brushes
• Painter's tape or masking tape

For this project, I decided not to do any special shape or anything.  I just sort of created some shapes on the canvas using the tape.  There wasn't really any rhyme or reason to how the tape ended up on the canvas.  I just sort of stuck it on there.

Then, I basically set the kids loose.  I squirted the paint onto some foil and let them kind of mix the paints or dab their brushes into the paints and put them on the canvas however they wanted.  For this part, my son really liked to mix the paints so some of his blocks ended up brown...Okay...a lot of them ended up brown....so I changed out his foil and did a little bit of each color.  I had to wash the brushes fairly often on this one so that they didn't end up with a swirl of brown all over the canvas.  The whole concept of separate brushes was fairly lost on my 3 and 4 year old children.  In the picture below, you can see where I had planned so awesomely that I ran out of blue painter's tape so I had to finish out my son's canvas with yellow masking tape.  This is routine around here that I will not plan through a project completely so...yeah, that's just how we roll.

You can actually see here where the colors have started to become brown on my son's canvas....

Once these were completely covered in paint, I let the kids pick two colors of glitter, and I helped them sprinkle glitter over the canvas.  Now for this part, some of the paint had already dried a little on parts so I actually used a little spray adhesive on it to get more of the glitter to stick.  You could probably add a little more paint to the dry areas to help that along before adding glitter if you don't have spray adhesive.  On my son's, he had actually painted over part of the tape, and I thought that actually looked kind of cool...

While these dried, I plopped the kids in the bath and washed the paint and glitter off them so the next few pictures will be of them in their PJs.  We believe in dressing up for pictures around here so they picked their favorite sleepy time gear for these photos.  By the time that we were done with arguments over who got to have a shower or a bath, which soap each child wanted, and which towel we wanted...enough time had passed that the paintings were dry enough to pull the tape off.  This was probably their favorite part since they were allowed to destroy something with my blessing...

This process took a few minutes to hunt for the pieces of tape and pull them off.  My son kept yelling that he had found "another surprise!" as he pulled the pieces of tape off.  The end masterpiece ended up being a pretty mosaic that looks really awesome!

The kids were pretty proud of their art, and they are now in search of where in the house they want us to hang their masterpieces! Total cost of supplies: about $15, total time invested: about 1 1/2 hours, total clean up time: about 20-30 minutes minutes, pride in a job well done: well...a picture is worth a thousand words...

All in all this was a really easy project to put together.  I hope that this tutorial made sense, and that I didn't confuse you too much!  If you end up doing this project, we'd love to hear about how they turned out and please let me know if you have any questions about anything that I did on here!  Thanks so much for stopping by and Blessings! 

Written by  Kim of Nini and Ash