Painting on Stuff

I've been wanting to try painting on different surfaces with Eliza for a while now. Actually, I've just been wanting to bust out the paints more, but I don't feel like I have the greatest indoor set up for messy projects. Originally I was going to try this at the kitchen table, but it occurred to me that the reason painting feels stressful to me sometimes is because a toddler sitting in a booster seat is probably the worst set up for painting! It seems so obvious now. Her little arms can't reach everything and the sleeves of her shirt get pulled through the paint. The space to actually paint on is limited by where she can reach. So at the last minute I moved this project outside. I'm thinking about carving out a corner of the basement for indoor messy art projects because I WOULD like to get messier with Eliza, but not necessarily in my kitchen.

We painted on an assortment of things I found around the house: a piece of foil, fabric, wax paper, vinyl and a toilet paper tube. Fun as it may look, I don't think Eliza spent more than 10 minutes actually painting. That is kinda how our projects go, 10 minutes of trying out an activity and then back to pretending. Eliza is all about the pretend world these days, which fascinates me so much. Her pretending is so involved, I could write about it for at least a whole other post, if not several!

There is a great post here on art activities to try with your toddler by one of my favorite bloggers, which is where I picked up this idea. We've only tried 5 of the 11 ideas listed to date, so this list should keep us busy a while. I think I want to try painting on bubble wrap next though!