An Art Experiment Gone Awry

Sometimes things don’t work out the way we planned.

That’s a pretty obvious statement, but when it comes to creating with kids, it’s pretty much always true.

Yesterday morning the girl wanted to look at an art book to find a new activity to try (love that!). I was looking at Pinterest at the time so I pulled up my art board and she saw this post on making your own textured paint brushes and decided she wanted to make one with pipe cleaners.

So far so good. You’d think an activity she chose would go well.

I found her some pipe cleaners and she found a craft stick to stick them to, since we didn’t have a brush handle handy.

She picked out some paint and sat down to work. I asked her what she thought would happen and she said the paint would be “swirly.”

I guess I should have known that was going to end poorly.

She made one brush stroke and declared it “too scratchy,” wadded her paper up and started to pout.

Oh well. I thought it was kind of cool. I used the rest of her paint (and just held the pipe cleaners in my hand) and I kind of liked the scratchy result.

We’ll probably try this one again sometime, but for now, I think we’ll stick to normal brushes.