Painting by smell

During a phone conversation last week, friend A mentioned a recipe for Kool-Aid paints she had seen in a magazine. The mixture called for a tablespoon of water stirred with a packet of Kool-Aid to make scratch-n-sniff watercolor paintings with your tots.

A and I agreed this was a clever use for a beverage mix that really should be used for no other purpose--the least of which being a drink you'd feed your kiddos--and we subsequently launched into slogging up our childhood Kool-Aid memories.

A recalled how much better the classic artificial fruit drink tasted when she slurped it at friends' homes because their moms actually included the recommended sugar, while her own mother had left it out.

I remembered mixing it into brewed iced tea in a travel mug for a pick-me-up at my early-morning summer drivers' ed classes in high school.

Our children, however, shall know nothing of the potable qualities of the stuff. They'll only know it as an art supply.

For 15 cents apiece I picked up some packets of Kool-Aid at the supermarket in a variety of flavors and colors. I then mixed up some of the Kool-Aid water colors and also squeezed out some regular tempera paints to mix and match. I love plastic ice cube trays as paint holders because there are so many compartments for either keeping colors separate or finding a space to blend them together. The watercolors required larger glass jars, however.

Instead of going free form like we usually do, for this project I printed free coloring pages from my favorite site for crafting templates. We chose bananas, cherries, grapes and other fruits that we thought would smell like some of the paints from our palette.

Away we went, mixing tempera colors with the scented hues, creating bananas with cherry-red peels and a pink-lemonade peaches. I loved that my L and C were combining sight and smell in their artwork today.

 

 

 

When the paintings dried the renderings really jumped off of the page with their candy-like aromas and bright colors. If you scratch the images they really do become more fragrant, too. I think we'll try this finger paint recipe next--on a day when we don't need to be clean for anything. We learned today the Kool-Aid stains fingers for a good half-dozen hand-washings.