Easy DIY Rainbow Painter

Oh how we love new books!  Honestly, just send Miss G and I to the bookstore or library for the afternoon and you’ll have two very happy girls on your hands. 

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Equally as awesome?  When new books surprise us and show up straight to our door!  Seriously – you’ve never truly seen Miss G excited until you’ve seen her walking up the porch steps to a package sticking out of the mailbox.  That was just the case with My Color Is Rainbow by Agns Hsu, the amazingly talented and creative mama behind Hello, Wonderful… We ripped the box open immediately of course, and found the sweetest story of self-discovery paired with gorgeous bold colours and illustrations inside – so fun and inspiring.

Now if you know us well, you know that second to a good book, we love a good book-inspired project.  We’ve done many of them over the years {see them here} and even teamed up with some of our favourite blogging friends to create an awesome ebook filled with book-inspried projects called Exploring Books Through Play.  So when we received My Color Is Rainbow, my mind immediately went to all kinds of amazing art projects we could do using rainbow colours.  {Seriously, is there anyone who doesn’t love rainbow??} I love BIG art and so does Miss G, so we eventually decided to create an easy DIY rainbow painter that would allow us to create big, gorgeous, vibrant rainbows in a single stroke and my gosh – did our little contraption ever turn out well!

Here’s what we used to create it…  Giant chip clips {we found ours hanging in a random spot in a local grocery store}, cotton balls, and our favourite Sax liquid watercolours {which admittedly feel like a pricey purchase, but seriously worth the money in my opinion}.

Now we attempted making our DIY rainbow painter two ways and though I think the second way is easier, I’ll share both as both worked well.  The first time around, we poured a small amount of each colour of liquid watercolours into an ice cube tray and then soaked our cotton balls {standing up} in the paint until it was fully absorbed.

When it was, we clipped the cotton balls into our chip clip side-by-side – a doable process, albeit a little bit messy.

Then we got to painting a huge rectangle of roll paper we’d previously taped to the playroom floor.

The results were just gorgeous.

Seriously…  Check out the amazingly bright colours the liquid watercolours produce.

Not to mention that Miss G had this giant paper filled with rainbows in about two minutes flat…

How fun!

What Grae did learn as she was painting was that our chip clip painter worked significantly better when she pulled it towards her, rather than pushed it away from her…  Pulling it allowed for a much smoother motion, and therefore a much smoother and more uniform rainbow.

Aren’t our rainbows the perfect backdrop for Agnes’ book??

Now because we were having so much fun, we decided to pull out a few canvases {including some awesome round ones!} and try our hand at making some art to hang on the playroom walls.  By this point we’d already gotten quite a lot of use out of our cotton balls, so we decided to freshen up our rainbow painter with new ones, only this time around we clipped the cotton balls into the chip clip first, and then poured the paint directly onto them.  This made the clipping process much easier / less messy and the finished result was just as good, so I’d definitely go with this method next time around.

Then it was time to get back to painting!

Isn’t my little artist sweet?

Because she was unhappy with how she’d accidentally flipped the rainbow painter around and not matched up the colours as she was hoping, she decided to add some cotton ball clouds to this particular canvas using our favourite glue…

Just wait until you see the finished product – it was definitely a happy mistake!

Here’s a peek at a couple of other canvases in progress…

So pretty, right??

And here they are once dry!  We haven’t decided where the two rectangular ones will go just yet, but I have the perfect spot in mind for the round one and I can’t wait to hang it!

For another fun way to paint rainbows in a single swipe, check out Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds’ Rainbow Sponge Painting on the Easel post. 

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