Spider Webs & the very busy spider

THE VERY BUSY SPIDER ~ Web/Glue paint activity.

After reading the Very busy spider by Eric Carle & noticing that my little one loved the feel of the spider web embossed we did this Art project using Glue & black paint, then he painted his webs & made spiders on wool web to hang off his Art.
He was so pleased with himself when he had his finished & dried project, spider & all, which felt just like the busy web in the story.

First you need PVA glue or similar & some cardboard or card stock.  If you have an older child they could help with this bit if they are patient enough to leave it dry overnight but seen as my little man is only 2 I pre-glued his web & put them out to dry.
Black glue:  Glue with black paint, or you could do red if you wanted, clear or any colour depending on what you wanted to use it for.

We tried a black web & a clear web.

Once they were dry (the next day) I got out the paints & some rollers, brushes and sponges. With a variety of colours I let my little boy pick & choose how he wanted them to look. I'm still trying to get him out of the habit of smearing, he loves to get a bit of green on his brush, then red, then yellow, then blue & so on before painting with it, mostly his art turns into a big smear of brown ha ha, but the rollers seem to do the job. He enjoys it!

One was yellow. I don't know how that worked so well, i think because I had a cheaper full paint tube of yellow. . . So I stacked the yellow on & it was his first choice, he had a little help with this one. Initial encouragement to show him the ropes, that's all! Then i let him at it.

This one above was a fence post, tree & a web through the sky. He did really well at painting the fence palings.  The one below was just a random experiment I did with the black glue on normal A4 printing paper to see if it was too thin but it worked fine, the glue also worked fine so i held onto it so he could use it up after he did his webs.

After all our paint sessions there must be an outburst of hand painting & messy prints on the left over newspaper, that's his new thing!

Then he helped with the spider making. These are our drying spiders. All they are made from is a large pom-pom with 2 eyes & 4 matchsticks criss crossed & glued on the underside.

Then a thread of wool is also glued to the under side. Easy peasy. I am sure their are some much more creative & better looking craft spiders out there but this is what i had in the junk box & it was something he could lend a hand in making. He chose the colours & put the eyes on, then the hardest bit was waiting for them to dry!

Once the base/background was dry on the yellow web we got a mauve coloured paint & a sponge, then only lightly smeared it over the web. This was in the aim to only brush over the intruding glue web that you can feel, just to make it stand out a little. This was his final task & here it is below.....

Once they are dry I scewed a hole threw the cardboard for the wool web to be threaded into, taped it  secure onto the back from one corner so the spider was hanging from the front of the web. Now that i am reflecting, it would possibly have a better effect with a shorter thread attached through the centre of the web!  This is web #1 that got given to Nanny, he was so happy to give her his master piece.

#2 web got kept. I asked who this one was for & he said it was a present for Daddy. I'm glad, I wanted to hold on to it, we'll put it into our under bed container of Art pieces & memories after it has been displayed for a while.