Making Art Supplies
I do not in any way consider myself to be an artist in the more typical medias such as painting or drawing.
The extent of my drawing abilities. (as a side note, child assisted story drawing is a fantastic way to pass time while waiting for a meal in a restaurant) t
In fact, I can really only draw stick people and my painting is, um, abstract. My girls on the other hand, love doing art as I think most children do. We don’t have a lot of fancy supplies, usually just some crayons, a few paint colors and paper. With a little glue and scissors thrown in for good measure. I would like to say that this is only due to our living simply creed, but actually it is largely because I prefer to avoid that colorings and toxins that are in many children’s art supplies. As much as I want buy the beautiful, healthy art supplies, they are also very costly and we just can’t afford them right now. So after stretching what we had as far as I could, I decided that I was just going to go ahead and buy the cheaper art supplies that I had been avoiding. The only problem was that when we went to the tiny stores in our tiny town, there weren’t any to be had. Nothing.
At other times, I had thought about attempting to make some of my own paint, crayons, modeling clay etc, but it just always seemed as if it would be a great deal of work. Not to be deterred from doing art with the girls, this time I actually went beyond doing some googling and came up with some ideas and recipes that I thought might work. A couple of the attempts worked well…a couple…need some tweaking. My experimenting got me thinking that maybe I should share some of my findings on here for any one who might also like to take on the challenge of making their own art supplies. So I am going to do a little series on doing art, naturally. I couldn’t just stick with telling you about how great and inexpensive the ones that I did are so I will also share my flops, including the crayons that Cecily said were, um, her poop. Hm.
Anyways. I had thought I might share one even tonight, but bed is sounding too sweet right now. I will just leave it there for now, but if any of you have tried making any kind of art medium that worked well, feel free to share. It might even save me from some more flops later this week!
Confessions of a Young Mama 
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You’re so creative, Missy! Would you like to do a post for Family Friday about homemade art supplies? Email me if you’re interested {neelamalik06[at]yahoo[dot]com}
Looking forward to your ideas.
Mel
Ha ha. I am in the same spot with not buying art supplies. We have just been using the basics and they have been doing painting with some Eco Kids paint. Made out of beets and stuff like that. Well, it’s awful stuff! Weird consistency (like flour), muted colors, fades after a while. After a year and a half of that being their only painting option, I finally bought some cheapo paints last week (but hey, it says non-toxic on it, and I am hoping that means something) that stink so much I have to have the windows open when they paint… but at least the colors are great and they are so, so happy to paint with bright colors!
Anyway I don’t have any good make-your-own type of ideas, sorry. I do turn Rilla loose on cutting up old magazines and she is really into that right now, so I suppose that counts for something. Mostly we just stick to pens and crayons and a stack of printer paper.