Art Inspired by the Book Swimmy

This morning we read the picture book Swimmy by Leo Lionni and made our own artwork inspired by the beautiful illustrations in the book.  Here's what we did..

The original idea was to do wet-on-wet watercolor and blow the paint around using straws to make an underwater scene.  First L and E (34 months) painted their papers with water.  But then when I took out the watercolors the girls got frustrated because the colors were not very vibrant (these were $1 watercolor paints that had already gotten a lot of use).  So I took out the food coloring, dabbed a bit on their paper, and invited the girls to spread out the color using water, which they loved doing:

The colors blended together beautifully and kept blending together as the soggy paper dried.  I was surprised that they faded so much during the drying process.  Later in the morning after the paint had dried, I took out all the underwater-themed stamps we had:

The girls then added stamps to their artwork:

They enjoyed this so much that they decorated both sides of their papers.  The results weren't exactly what I had envisioned for this project, but they were nevertheless beautiful and definitely had similarities to some of the artwork in Swimmy, even if the technique was different.  Painting with water and food coloring was probably my favorite part of the activity, and I'm sure we'll be experimenting more with that soon.