Play Doh – it’s the bane of many parents everywhere, as it gets in the carpet, never to come out again. And those kits they sell? Those can be cute, but flimsy.
But Play-Doh does offer some incredible sensory benefits for kids. It also strengthens little hands for writing and painting.
So when my daughter was given a box of every color of the rainbow, and I was feeling a little Impressionistic, after being cooped up in the house from an ice storm, we got out the all the colors and got ready to paint with Play-Doh.
A Framework for the Picture
If your house is like mine, you always have a few empty cardboard boxes ready to recycle. Grab a piece of cardboard of any size and you have instant canvas, for free. I used ones that were a bit smaller, since my kids are smaller, approximately 5 x 7.
Looking at the drawing guide, they loosely sketched out contour lines onto the piece of cardboard, paying attention to the location of the fields and the windmill.
For our project, I gave my Sparklettes a beautiful line drawing of Monet’s tulip fields from a Deep Space Sparkle Art Through the Ages project. I absolutely love these drawing guides and my girls do too. Today I had something different in mind.
Even if the Sparklettes didn’t like their lines, they were going to cover them with Play-Doh, so they had an opportunity to correct anything they didn’t like, even though they did it in Sharpie.
Light or Full Coverage
Little Sparklette chose to use very little Play Doh at a time and press it down with her thumb to create texture. Big Sparklette wanted to cake it on like all-day full facial concealer.
Both of them opted to add the windmill in as their final piece.
A box, a Sharpie, and any colors of Play-Doh, and they created a Monet masterpiece.
A Few Other Options for Kids
This beautiful line drawing is only available for members of the Deep Space Sparkle Sparklers’ Club, but there are a lot of other options out there to get your kids to paint with Play-Doh.
If kids have a favorite coloring page, and they are either too young to create a line drawing, or you feel they might get tired out, you can tape the coloring page directly to a piece of cardboard. This is an optional step, but a regular piece of paper will not hold the Play-Doh well if they have hopes of showing it off.
Elementary age kids can practice tracing their favorite images from a magazine and creating their own line drawing, which can then be colored in.
Use the Sharpie to add patterns or lines to the Play-Doh once it’s on the cardboard for extra flair.
So grab those boxes, and those leftover rainbow and overly-mixed containers and get ready to paint with Play-Doh.
For ways to use tracing in your homeschool, see my guide here.
