When I was asked to donate a few ideas for the “heart book project”, I went to my preschool to try and find some inspiration on what I could share. I looked around the room and decided to see what I could do with a roll of paper towels I had sitting on my shelf. In the end, I came up with this pretty paper towel heart activity…
To make this, I cut out heart shapes from a roll of paper towels then placed them on a large sheet of white paper and painted over them…
The paper towel hearts have a “doily-like” design on them that shows through once you press the paper towel hearts on your paper. But first, you paint over the entire heart shape(s) on a piece of heavy white paper…
Next, place another sheet of white paper over the painted hearts and firmly rub the paper all over then peel off your top layer of paper and set aside. Next place your canvas on top of the the painted paper with the hearts, then flip it completely over and firmly rub the paper again…
Finally, peel the paper off the canvas (hearts and all) and you have now transferred your painting to the canvas. By painting on paper first, you can almost see the final results before transferring the paint onto the canvas…
After you paint the hearts and transfer the painting to the canvas, you will end up with a set of colorful paper towel hearts too. If set aside to dry, the paper towel hearts become stiff and dry and can be used in other activities or artwork…
So the above instructions is how I made my own paper towel heart art on canvas but when I shared the idea with my students, their heart art turned out a little bit different…
I should have taped the paper towels to the paper because the children had a hard time keeping the paper towels in one spot on the paper while they painted…
Also, my students realized that red, white, and blue all mixed together will make purple so they spent most of their time making purple paint and painting all purple hearts…
And the children didn’t quite understand that the goal was to create a painting using the entire paper. They just thought they were to paint the paper towel hearts so we ended up with lots and lots of purple painted paper towel hearts and the purple blobs on black or white paper…
About half way through this process, I didn’t even worry about trying to make a pretty heart canvas with the children. I just let the children have fun painting purple on their paper towel hearts. Perhaps if I do this again, we will walk through the process a little more carefully, and I will hide the blue paint…
Bit in any case, the children enjoyed the color mixing and their collection of purple hearts. I hung my own pretty paper towel heart canvas on my wall in my office as a reminder that not every process will turn out quite as planned but it is the process that matters the most to the children…
This project is part of the heart project. Be sure to check it out and get your own copy of the heart book today…
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Copyright 2011 © Deborah J. Stewart
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