One day whilst trying to come up with a craft project to entertain a couple teenagers I cam up with something creative and fun that ended up being expanded from what I originally came up with. Splatter painting is easy and fun and can be incorporated into many projects. So far in my house we have splatter painted paper (both blank and old book pages), a bird decoy and clothing.
For the simple craft of splatter painting paper, or some other item like the bird decoy, you just need regular acrylic paints. For splatter painting on clothing, sheets, or any other material that will needs to be washed you will need fabrics paints. I will start with direction for splatter painting with acrylics and then follow with splatter painting with fabric paints.
Acrylic Splatter Painting
If you purchase the acrylic paints that come in the bottles you will have a more liquid paint to work with, which will splatter much better than the more expensive tube acrylics. You will need to lay out plastic in the area where you will be splattering so that your whole house doesn’t end up splattered. We did ours in the kitchen where it would be easy to clean up anything that made it past our plastic. Place your items to be splattered on your plastic. Put paint in small plastic cups, with a paint brush for each color. Pick the paint brush out of your first color choice and flick it at your item. The flick motion will spray, or splatter, paint on your item. Use as many colors as you’d like until your item is splatter the way you like it. Let your items dry before moving them and cleaning up.
Fabric Splatter Painting
For this project we hung our clothing items out on the clothes line in our yard. We ended up with three shirts, a skirt and a pair of shorts to splatter paint. The fabric paints were a little thick, so we mixed a couple table spoons of water in each to make them more liquid. Again, place each color in a different small plastic cup and put a paintbrush in each. Take turns with the colors splattering your pieces of clothing. Let the clothing remain on the clothes line until the paint is dry. Wash the items (inside out) before wearing them. I dry mine on low and have had no problems with the color spreading, sticking or fading.
These projects are fun for all ages, but they can prove to be messy. Always do splatter painting with ample adult supervision.