Colourful Painted Handprint Keepsakes

Yay!  Another round of Preschool Book Club with our lovely friends – Buggy and Buddy, Sugar Aunts, Frogs Snails and Puppy Dog Tails, and Homegrown Friends!

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Miss G and I absolutely adore I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More! by Karen Beaumont, so we couldn’t wait for this week to finally roll around.  If you haven’t read it yet, it’s about a little artist who can’t help but paint – especially when it comes to painting himself!  It’s full of rhyme, rhythm, vibrant colours, and a little bit of naughtiness too, which makes for a really fun and interactive read aloud.

The illustration of the boy’s painted hand is one of Miss G’s favourites, and it’s actually what inspired us to create our colourful paint handprint keepsakes.  {Not to mention the fact that we’ll pretty much take any opportunity we can to create something that involves handprints, footprints, or fingerprints…}

To start off, we rolled out some Prang DAS air-dry clay quite thin {about a half a centimetre thick maybe?} and traced Miss G’s hands onto the surface of the clay using a pencil.  {This part of the project is almost identical to the way we made our adorable hand-shaped ring dish, except for the fact that the clay needs to be thicker for the ring dish.}

Then, using a small sharp knife, I carefully cut the hand shape out.

While Miss G created several of her own clay creations, I smoothed out the edges of our hand shapes by dipping my finger in a little bit of water and running it along the sides of the shape.

After letting our handprints dry for a full 24 hours {and flipping them periodically}, we were ready to paint!

Before painting, Grae and I read the book once more and soaked in all sorts of inspiration from the illustrations.

Then it was time to paint!  We got out an assortment of acrylic paints and decided that we’d cover the handprints with a base of colour, let them dry, and then go back and add our designs, splatters, and patterns on top afterwards.

Acrylic paint tends to dry really quickly {especially here in the desert}, so the whole process didn’t take that long.

In the end, our colourful painted handprint keepsakes looked like this…

Definitely something you’d see in I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More, I think. ☺

In order to display our hands, we got out our favourite Scotch removable mounting squares, a square shadow box from Ikea, a square of thick white card stock to fit inside the frame.

Then we simply pressed the colourful painted handprint firmly down onto our card stock, placed the card stock into our shadow box, and voilà!

A beautiful handprint keepsake to display in Miss G’s eclectic little room.

Ready to see what our Preschool Book Club friends did with this book?  Check out these fun projects:

 

cardboard dollhouse  |  body painting  |  counting math game  |  colour identification game

Want to try a little preschool book club of your own?  You can see the entire series here.