Kids Art: Textured Paper Bookmarks

It's no secret that we love making painted textured papers at home. The kids and I try various materials to create textures, and over time, I have settled upon a few trusted favorites to produce the effects we like and keep going back to: #12 flat brush, natural sponge, scrubber sponge, paint roller, toothbrush.

As always, any available paper is game, but a staple is the plain backside of used copy/print paper.

Anyway, this set of papers were such fun as Oggie was zooming on full throttle, raring to go: picked out the colors we should mix, settled at his table with a stack of papers and materials, ready to paint away.

I doled out some lightly diluted red, yellow, blue, and white tempera paints in small canning jars, as usual. And gave him one of my paint palettes to start mixing. We talked about what we wanted to use the textured papers for: to make fruits collage for the Bookmarks, something that celebrates books, and something that inspires...

Which helped us zero in on the colors we wanted to end up with during the mixing process - purplish blue for plums, orang-ish red for strawberries, orange for oranges,  green plus a bit of yellow for pears.

Now, we did toss around ideas for various fruits until we agreed on the fairly good-sized ones (I *might* have steered him a bit towards fruits that are easier to cut out and collage). Blue for blueberries was a given, but, little tiny blue circles seemed a bit tedious to cut out as I would be in-charge of the cutting.

Inspiration comes from many places and am sure we were strongly influenced by a firm favorite book on our bookshelf, which set the direction for our work.

After painting the papers, we set it out for drying; I cut out the shapes; Og helped glue many of them (not all) on to the bookmarks; I added a few words; and they were ready!

Except, we were using a couple and found that the precious fruits kept wanting to snag on paper; so we decided to laminate the bookmarks