Negative Art and Cotton Swab Bones

We made negative art by spraying paint on top of our hands!

Now, I know that this has been done many times before

in fact

that's the reason we did it!

While studying about Argentina

we came across

Cueva de las Manos

(cave of the hands)

which has hundreds of negative stencils on the wall

over 800 of them

(I read that only about 30 of them are right hands)

wikipedia.com

At first the girls sprayed each other's hands with watered down paint

then

I decided to let them try it the way it was originally done at Cueva de las Manos

with paint (mineral pigments) blown through straws (bones)

They had fun sucking up the paint

(there was a hole cut into the top to keep them from sucking all the way up)

and then blowing it out

but it was a pretty big fail as far as getting handprints

the paint seeped under their fingers into a big blob

So we moved back to spraying with the bottle

We sprayed with white paint on black foam core board

to recreate the wall at Cueva de las Manos

I like it!

 I wanted to use the black foam core board to make something spooky for Halloween

but I liked the results so much I decided to keep it the way it was

so we did more spraying!

 I got out our anatomy book and we examined the placement of bones in the hand

 and used cotton swabs as bones to fill in our negative hand prints

 I think they turned out perfectly spooky and just right for Halloween

This activity is linked to these awesome linky parties:

Show-and-Share Saturday

The Play Academy

The Sunday Showcase

It's Playtime!