annieb123's Review of The Grown-Up's Guide to Painting with Kids (Grown-Up's Guide)

by Jennifer McCully

The Grown-Up’s Guide series features how-to projects, creative prompts, and crafting activities that will inspire you and your little ones to spend hours of messy fun together. Now you can learn the fun, trendy paint pouring technique—and teach your kids to do it too!

Paint pouring, also known as fluid art, uses acrylic paint and a variety of everyday tools to create colorful, abstract art poured on canvases and other surfaces. With The Grown-Up’s Guide to Painting With Kids, prepare to get messy—some techniques require touching or even hitting the paint—but that’s half the fun! Kids will love the tactile nature of paint pouring, while you and the other grown-ups in their lives will feel good knowing that your children are exercising their creative and artistic playful side. Consider doing the projects outside, where it's OK to make a mess!

The book opens with an introduction to the affordable tools required to pour paint, from cups and canvases to stir sticks, paper, reusable straws, and more. Older kids—with the help of their parents, of course—might even learn to use a heat torch to create the cell-like structure typical in fluid art. Techniques are outlined so that you and your children can read about the pouring process before getting started. Then there are chapters on color mixing tips, instructions for finishing paintings with varnish and other materials, and much more. The step-by-step projects that follow are fun, easy, and easily customizable by color, surface, and skill level. They can even be done on surfaces other than canvas, such as coasters, pieces of wood, gift boxes, and much more.

Kids of all ages will love pouring paint. You can help too, ensuring family togetherness for hours as you and your children learn to create colorful, abstract art together with The Grown-Up’s Guide to Painting With Kids.

Originally published on my blog: my link text.

The Grown-Up's Guide to Painting with Kids is a tutorial and resource guide filled with fun liquid art (paint pouring) projects for kids (and their adults). Released 2nd June 2020 by Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 128 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.

I noticed something when going through this book. While it certainly is full of guided creative tutorials for painting with kids, I noticed *myself* opening up and not stifling myself at all during the process. This is an incredibly valuable side-effect of taking the focus off of ourselves and letting the process happen. I heartily recommend doing these fun exercises for us personally before we try them out with students or our own kids. I suffer a lot from the "instant expert" expectations for myself (happily, I don't do it to anyone but myself.. but it's still a drag, not feeling like my own art is "good enough"). This little book helped me get over that feeling a little bit.

Paint pouring is completely serendipitous and not under the artist's control in a lot of ways. That makes it perfect for concentrating on the process and creativity. The author uses about 15% of the page content giving a good introduction to the tools, materials, and techniques and then leads into the tutorials. A lot of the prompts are "what happens when we..." and include some really pretty finished projects like a cloud mobile with randomly colored raindrops.

Each of the projects includes an intro/description, tools and materials, and step by step photo tutorial. The photography is clear and abundant. There are color photos on every page. Alternate steps and enhancements are included for many of the activities.

This would make a superlative choice for a staying home activity, as well as a great idea for a library or classroom activity (when we can gather together again).

Five stars. There are a lot of good ideas here.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

The Grown-Up's Guide to Painting with Kids (Grown-Up's Guide)

by Jennifer McCully

Reviewed by annieb123 on Jun 9, 2020

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