Month: March 2015

Multicoloured Art Hands: To wash or not to wash?

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I had a great question from a Dabble Art Mum last Monday.

“How do you get water paint off skin? Soap doesn’t seem to work.”

I usually wear my paint stained hands with pride, like some kind of metal of honour, not minding if others think it looks grubby, so I didn’t have an answer off the top of my head.  But, unlike my groovy little Dabblers, I don’t have to go school and present myself in a neat manner, so I got to thinking and tried out a bi-carb soda paste.

I mixed 2 tablespoons of bi-card soda and 1 tablespoon of water in a bowl to form a runny paste. I scrubbed my hands with the paste then added a few squirts of soap and scrubbed a little more before rinsing my hands off in water.

It didn’t magically remove ALL of the pigment (and it was the darker pigments that were harder to lift. The paste worked really well on lighter colours) but it did a pretty good job, better than just soap and water. Ordinarily, the colour comes off reasonably quickly (within 24 hours) with just soap and water, but the bi-carb paste can speed things up a little.

If anyone else has any cool (and safe) suggestions, we’d love to hear about them.

Character Art

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Last week during workshops we talked about characters and the difference between a picture and a character, for example, the difference between a picture of a cat and a character that happens to be a cat. We looked at a few story books for examples and inspiration then developed our own simple character development guide that listed a few questions to think about while we were working:

  • What is its name?
  • What does it look like? Does it wear anything that is not typical?
  • What is special about it? Can it do something that is not typical?
  • What kind of mood is it in? What emotion/s is it expressing?

Illustrations often have great detail and can convey so much of a story on their own. If a viewer looks carefully, they can discover a lot about a character, even when there aren’t words!

When you look at these characters, what can you tell about them?