Painting on a large scale.

Sometimes the best results come about by sheer accident & those that I have spent ages planning for have been complete wash outs - such is life with young children!

This latest art activity was a perfect example of the former; after creating the paper plate faces last week I had 6 pots of paint left & it just would have been a shame to wash the paint out & down the sink. So I planned for the children to do some free painting this week to use up the left over paint. I had intended for them to just use A4 sized pages but then by sheer chance I found a load of A3 good quality cartridge paper at the bottom of the paper store. So the set up for this activity was for 4 children at a time to just paint on the large pages as they wanted to.I had talked to them about this activity briefly just before home time the day before & we had talked about how they could cover the whole page or just paint on one area.

It was lovely to watch how they all approached this in a different way. Some spent a long time making sure they covered the whole page & then as the first layer began to dry added some more details. There were 2 different types of brushes either very fine or much thicker, some enjoyed making large prints with the larger brushes, almost like spots. 

They enjoyed having black paint & I was most surprised that they didn't just cover the painting with black. They also managed for the most part to keep the brushes in the separate pots - there were 6 various colours on offer.

On this occasion 17 of the 16 children got a chance to take part with others wanting to but we had run out of time but I will offer the others an opportunity to have a go at this activity another day.

**The next day the others had a chance to try this activity & I was impressed that several reluctant mark makers joined in, making treasure maps & a chocolate factory. Having recorded all the painting on the iPads I reluctantly agreed to letting these fab art works going home!