papershine

How to make your own Roller Painting: Spread out a large sheet of paper on a table or floor. Banner bond paper works well and can be found at your big box office stores as well as local art supply stores. Tape the paper down so it can’t move around. If you’re going to do it on the floor, choose a low traffic area so it doesn’t get stomped on while the paint is drying. What a mess…

Put your paint in low, open containers, like styrofoam trays. Kristin and Abe used poster paints, sometimes called tempera. Whatever you use, make sure it’s washable! Different sized rollers create varying sized lines. Wrap masking tape around a roller to create stripes. One of the rollers Abe is holding in the video has tape on it. Rollers are great for creating long roads and curvy snakes. Sponge bottles were used to make the round shapes.

Kid Art blogs are a new feature on papershine. We’ll be doing periodic updates of art projects Kristin does with the boys. Drawing on her experience as an art teacher, we’ll offer ideas for projects people can do at home with their kids.

On Friday Papershine hosted it’s first Poster Party and Art Show at the West End Bakery in West Asheville. The event was to celebrate the creation of Papershine- our educational design studio- and the release of Learning Murals, our first product line. The event was well-attended by the under-7 set and their parents. We had four poster-coloring stations set up around the bakery and hundreds and hundreds of crayons and colored pencils. It was great fun and very noisy. The bakery provided tiny PB&J sandwiches, cookies and brownies.

Our friend Todd brought his one year old son Lucas, seen here exchanging crayons with Abe before they tackled Abe’s Alphabet together.

It was fantastic to see how many parents got involved and colored with their kids. The greatest thing about the size of the Learning Murals is how it allows collaboration. A whole family can work together on a poster. It’s such a natural and fun way to interact and play together.
Kristin and I would like to thank the many people who made this all come together: Cathy, Krista, Louis, Reid and everyone else at the bakery for letting us take it over for an evening; all of our contributing artists- Lucy, Chelsea, Amy, Athena, Bergen, Sirus, Jerome, Sara, Jason, the Red Stick Ramblers, Grace, Matt, Henry, Linda and Gary; Will and compnay at Henco Reprographics for printing the posters and being so supportive; Merrimon Galleries for an excellent job mounting the art work, Sara for staffing the wine table and the Asheville Mamas for showing up in force.

Thanks for the color.

This is a small sample from the Friends with Hobbies Learning Mural. Kristin and I completed this one as a ’sampler’ to show several different media on a single poster. This fellow is done with collage- mostly from toy catalogs, magazine ads and origami paper- and magic marker. The butterfly is a digital print of a gulf fritillary we photographed at the butterfly exhibit at the WNC Nature Center a couple of weeks ago.