Number Hunt to Marbling Activity

Number Hunt Trail to a fun Marbling Experiment.

I started Dimples on a Number Hunt. He put on his hat & grabbed his bucket at the first arrow.

Yesterday while searching the bargain shops I came across a stick it note pad shaped as an arrow.

I started with 1 with a picture of a camera, so we grabbed One camera.

the follow was an arrow with the number 2 and a dinosaur on it, Dimples followed the direction of the arrow and came across 2 dinosaurs. He put them in his bucket.

then there was an arrow with the number 3 & a pictures of a car, he followed the arrow to 3 cars and put them in his bucket. Then there was a 4 with a stick looking thing on it :-? It was a pipe cleaner, so he followed it and found 4 pipe cleaners.

The trail led him outside where I had set up an experimental Marbling Activity, like the one we done previously experimental-marbling.
Next, an Arrow with 5 lizards leading to 5 toy lizards, 6 was knives and forks, which lead to a trail of plastic cutlery. Last was 7 with a picture of a marble which went to 7 marbles just under the table that was set up.

All the things in Dimples bucket were to be used as tools in the shaving cream tub.  I set out a tray filled with shaving cream, the paint/ink, glitter, a brush, a bucket of water (to wash excess cream off and for Dimples hands) and some paper.

First he sprinkled the glitter on and i sprinkled the ink, then he picked out some dinosaurs and lizards to trudge through the mass of cream, glitter and paint. then they walked across the paper.  The idea wasn't to put prints on the paper, this was just part of Dimples process- what he wanted to do.
The main idea was to mix around the colours before putting the paper face down in the tray to absorb the swirled ink. Just like we did in our experimental marbling.

It got messy very quickly, that's how we like it (& that's why we do a lot of our activities outdoors)
Next he used the cars to make a donuts/burn out rings. I sprinkled some more colours in it and Dimples made the cars make circular tracks.  Then the paper went face down and pressed down, then i scrapped the excess cream off the top of the paper with a card & what was left was a cool swirled pattern of ink.

Dimples tried out the forks and lightly manoeuvred them through the ink, then a rolling pin, a brush, then his fingers. Dinosaurs and cars were his favourite!

The best results came from having a dull base colour (mix one colour through all the shaving cream and smooth it all. Then using bright colours to sprinkle over the top. The mix these around a bit, but not too match that they blend. When you put your paper down, smooth it out from top down first to bottom so you have no air pockets that will leave big blank spots!

Then let it sit on it face up for a little while, less than a minute & scrape it off with cardboard of a plastic spatula or take away container lid.

with a pink background

swirls

with a grey background

Projective Inkblots

Anyone who knows me will know that I am studying a Psychology Bachelors Degree, I am no where near my goal and it is seeming to take for ever but I am determined to get there & be labelled a Registered Psychologist. What I do from there is still unknown.

I recently went away for my on-campus residential for the subject Psychological testing & Assessment, one of things that popped up was the development of the Projection Test as one of the first Personality tests. Developed initially by Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytic Theorist, Inkblots soon developed further and The Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) were coined, if you have any interest in Psychology who may have heard of these as they are the two most widely used Projection tests, and they were both important milestones in the clinical field.

The test assumes that the person being tested is projecting their personalities into the inkblots.  Further, the test assumes that since the person is focusing on the inkblot in order to identify what it resembles, they would be removing the attention of themselves and therefor remove their usual psychological defences. Since the same inkblot could seem like everything and nothing, any object or idea that the subject claims to see would be a product of the subject’s unconscious projected onto the inkblot.  That is the history.

Now, I am not a fan of Freud and anyone who has read about him may feel the same, he is often seen as a creep with sexually deviant desires and his theories surrounding early childhood are very radical and some what disturbing. None the less, he is a major player in Psychology and I do understand the basis of Projective tests.

Out of curiosity I made some inkblots with Smiley. I still have ink left over from our experimental Marbling in November.  So I got that out to use. It was a fun process and a learning activity for him as he got to see how the ink transferred onto both sides when folded in the paper and how the colours smeared together.

I cut A4 White printing paper in half and did about 10 inkblots.  I asked smiley to choose his colours, splash some dots on the paper and then we folded them in half. Using the same technique you would if you were making butterflies with paint. Open them up and put them up to dry.

Once they were dry I asked smiley what they looked like. What do you think that is,  and what is it doing?  I did this purely out of curiosity, and of course for the process of making them, i didn't intend to perform any type delving technique and I wasn't going to look into what he said for some underlying hidden meaning. 

He is nearly 3 and that would be totally inappropriate, so I did it purely to see where his imagination took him and how well he could attend, listen and talk about the pictures. Through open ended questioning I thought it would also help develop his language and conversational skills. But most of all, they were fun to make and they do look pretty unique and interesting.

He did really well and he is suprising me a lot lately with how grow up he is becoming. Time has gone so fast and he isn't my little baby anymore he is becoming a little boy.  All grow up he says "OK, Show me this one!" and took the inkblot, as the tests are ambiguous they can be seen in any direction or angle that the viewer wants them to be in and this is funnily exactly what he did.

He twisted and turned it around, hummed & hared tilting his head at all different angles then announced this one is a Big Camp Fire, like the one out the bush!  (we had a bomb-fire that day but if it were a real adult projection test the psychoanalyst might have said that represents a hot temper or signifies anger rising up - PFFtTt so the tests as you can imagine aren't really that popular these days)

It was very humorous to me, my little man so grow up telling me stories about what it is. "Lets see" he would say & squint, with a real serious look on his face. "This one has huge Antennas" he said, and then from there on it was an insect theme.

There was a Spider eating his food. There was a cranky biter cricket with huge antennas.  A squashed frog with a fat belly that a car had run over, A beautiful butterfly of course and an explosion in the water from what i gather. There were lots of sound effect, boom, splash, pachoooow and lots of cute facials!

The last one, which was totally out of the theme was Poppy with his glasses on which surprised me because he hasn't seen Poppy for a couple of weeks and the picture was, well very ambiguous but I can see where he got the glasses from (it was 2 big yellow blots that looked like round eyes, or glasses).

Here are some below; The fire, the spider eating his food & the cranky cricket 

Experimental Marbling

Marbling: Water, Oil or shaving cream?

I recently bought a small ink marbling kit for Dimples. We have experimented before with shaving cream marbling and food colour, I have tried to mix oil based paints and poster paint but have Failed in my marbling attempts.

So first up we tried the marbling as per the instructions, ink on water in a tray. If your marbling is ink it is recommended you put a dash of vinegar in the water, so we did this.

Dimples squirts his pick of colours in the water and uses a skew to stir and mix. Then we place the paper on top, you don't submerse it and there is no need to leave it there for long.

it worked OK. Not as bright as I would have liked.

Then we tried again with some oil in the water.

You can see this one worked better, the first ones were very light & vague in colour, you can see below where the oil dots formed.  Dimples was whisking the oil and trying to separate it while he was stirring the colours.

Then we moved on to Shaving cream, this worked the best by far.  I filled the tray with shaving cream and gave dimples the inks to choose his colours and squirt them around on the shaving cream.  I love shaving cream, its so versatile. We have done a few posts using shaving cream!

The colours always look so much more vibrant on it.

Then we used a fork to slice the colours and mix them a bit.

Then we placed the paper on top of it, flattened it down and pulled it off.

This part gets a little tricky so this is were Mummy's help is needed!  You need a piece of cardboard or something to whip off the shaving cream, once you clear it off your paper the ink marbling remains on your paper.

Magic.....  This use of the ink marbling gives you a more effective, brighter piece of art compared to the usual water and oil marbling.

And as usual, with shaving cream art leads to play, play leads to mess & Dimples feels the need to attack the dog & cover him in shaving cream also. FUN! The dog doesnt look very impressed...