Hand Print Mum Paintings

One of my favorite sights of fall includes beautiful fall mums. I love the variety of colors and I would buy one of each color for the house if I could!

It seemed like a fun idea to try and recreate mums with the kiddos in a craft project: we were inspired to try creating Handprint Mum Paintings. I decided this would be a great project to do with Little Brother.

I do have to admit that sometimes "toddler art" throws me for a little bit of a loop. Although I had one idea for this project in my head of what it would look like, Little Brother took it in his own direction and it looked a little different than I was expecting. But I do love how much he got into painting it, so I decided I still wanted to share it.



Materials: 
Paint (we used green, red, purple, and white)
White paper
Brown/Orange construction paper
Traditional paint brushes
A "textured" object to paint with like a scrub brush or tooth brush.

First we painted one of Little Brother's hands green and printed it several times onto the white paper. We then let the handprints dry. While they dried we inspected the real mums outside.

After the handprints had dried I set up the paint for Little Brother, we used shallow container lids. The plan was to use these paints to create the flowers of the mums. One was for red, another for purple, and the last mixed the two colors plus a little white to make a light purplish red. Little Brother has been loving painting with these long handled scrub brushes, so I put one of those out. 

Little Brother eagerly got to work using the different colors to paint onto his hands. I encouraged him to stay on the top part of the hand, so we could add pots. But he tended to be interested in working all over his paper. 

He started to get a little wild with the painting (mostly by smearing) of the paint. I tried modeling an idea for how to get a texture paining on the finger tips only, but he was more intrigued with his own process. 

When he was finished he had a lot of paint all over the hands. 

We again let the paint dry. When they were dry I cut three small flower pot shapes from orange and brown construction paper. Once the paint dried, I helped Little Brother to glue these onto his picture. 

We now had a picture of three mum plants and a proud toddler who had worked hard on his artwork. 

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