Social Distancing with Kids Is Fun: Rollerball Paint Cards
I swear, not every single kids activity we post will be paint related. Hand to God. In fact, today’s planned activity had zero percent paint involvement, but it was postponed due to slacker behavior on my part. Don’t delay your morning caffeine ritual when you are on a deadline, guys. So we ended up making these rollerball paint cards to send to our elderly relations who are stuck inside. My parents were supposed to visit us this week, but had to cancel because of the pandemic, and I know they are going to LOVE getting these handmade cards in the mail.
You will need:
Boxes, or at least one box, about shoebox size is good
Any type of acrylic paint, although thinner paint spreads more easily; I think fingerpaint would be a dream here
Balls of varying sizes and weights, preferably non-porous so you can wash them off easily
Paper, any kind of paper, up to and including junk mail
A palette knife if you’re fancy (optional)
Sharpies and/or paintbrushes (optional)
Instructions:
Put paper in the box
Add some globs of paint. Less is kind of more on this one. Especially the thicker artist's paint we used would hamper the balls’ movement if there was too much. You can see in our pictures and video that when we added huge globs of paint, not much in the way of interesting patterns emerged. This is where you can use the palette knife or any kind of spreader if you want to be more precise in you application. We found it easier to just squeeze the paint directly onto the paper.
Add in some balls. More balls mean more movement, which means more mixing things up.
Close the lid and shake-shake, shake-shake-a shake it!
Take it out, set it aside to dry, and repeat with new paper and fresh balls (or reuse the same balls to mix in more colors).
Optional: Let your kids paint or draw Cthulhu on top of the crazy patterns, or write a short message
