For all you grandmothers out there:

{{gwi:2144092}}

Materials:
One canvas (that an adult paints with a pink wash of acrylic )paint.
One small sponge brush.
Pink, red, and purple acrylic paint
One black felt tip pen.
Sticky-backed craft hearts.

Give a base coat of pink to the canvas.Make the paint fairly watery, but still obviously pink. Let dry.
Have child paint with purple. Let dry. (I found that one brush load of paint was enough for each color application.)
Have child paint with red. Let dry.
Have child paint with pink. Let dry.

Little children have a tendency to paint or color in one place.
That's OK for the paint. Just make sure you show them a good place to start their brush
so that they put paint strokes on different areas of the canvas.

For the black lines.
Tell child that it's The Rule that he has to start
in the middle and go ALL AROUND. Demonstrate with your finger on the canvas.
As you can see, my Zoe followed that rule for the first black marks only.
But that's OK. Just a couple of wide, random black strokes is enough so that there aren't too many big, black globs in one place, which is what you want to avoid.

Then the child can apply the hearts anywhere they want. Turns out pretty cute (if viewed from a distance).
Set it next to some other red valentine-y things and it looks great!

P.S. The child that made this "art" is 3 years, 1-1/2 months old - just to give you an idea. I wouldn't suggest trying this with a child very much younger.

This post was edited by oldalgebra on Fri, Feb 6, 15 at 16:00