Spider Hand Prints for Halloween

Halloween Greetings to all! We created some spooky artwork last week gearing up to celebrate Halloween. This was definitely an art project that focused on the art process - it took three days, but was well worth the wait. Any project that helps a three year old work on patience gets a thumbs up in my book.

Day 1 - Claire drew a web in white crayon. The idea was to get some lines on the page, this is Claire's work so I wasn't preoccupied with the perfect web shape. Claire filled the entire page with purple liquid watercolors and any puddling was quickly absorbed by the paper and wound up looking mottled - very cool indeed. We kept a wet rag handy to catch any spills, these paints are sure potent!

On day two we moved onto the spider hand prints. I painted Claire's fingers and most of her palm (her giggles were hilarious) and helped her press each hand onto the web we painted the day before.

I suppose at this point you could have glued the googley eyes on while the paint was still wet, but I wanted to stretch this out as long as possible. We hung the eyeless critters up to dry and called it quits.

On day three we talked a lot about spiders and their eight legs (and eyes!). I poured some glue into a spoon for her to use and gave her a paint brush to apply it. This seems to be one of the neatest ways for Claire to use glue. We put eight eyes on one of the spiders but it just didn't look right. Maybe if we had a few different sizes we would have been more successful. We stuck with the cartoony spider version and just used two. Of course I forgot to snap photos of the eyes actually glued on...but there are a few photos in the slideshow of our glue-spoon contraption. Have a spooky-fun Halloween!



For those Mac folks without the capability of playing flash - here's the link to the album: Spider Hand Prints there are a few more of cutie-pie Claire and her artwork there.