Make-A-Wish Collaborative Art

Last Saturday The Art Pantry team was invited to create a playful family experience for the Walk For Wishes event held at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, Ca. This was a fundraiser for the Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area foundation to raise money in order to fulfill the wishes of kids with life-threatening medical conditions. If you haven’t heard of them, check out the Batkid wish they granted almost two years ago. Incredible.

I’m happy to say that the event raised enough money to grant 13 wishes!

Our activity at this event was part of the Plae area (sponsored by Plae Shoes), where families can engage in playful and creative activities. Some stations were all about getting active like Red Tricycle’s “Soul Tricycle” class, or Wheel Kids’ balance bike obstacle course. Our challenge, along with Play-Well -who had everyone building cool Lego sculptures- was to get families to have fun and create something together.

Collaborative Art

We knew we wanted to do a community mural, but we also wanted to incorporate the theme of Make-A-Wish and thought that having people blow a wish onto a canvas would be really fun. We decided on two collaborative art pieces: A Community Painting and a Bubble Print Canvas.

Activity Re-Cap & How To Do Collaborative Art

Setting up with the rest of The Art Pantry team…

Ora and I tested out our homemade bubble wands, while Karuna and LuRay mixed the paint and made our sign (how’s that for last minute?). Aaron was out there meeting and greeting and getting everything else done.

Community Painting

For the community painting, we used a large stretched canvas and acrylic paints. I knew I was being risky offering non-washable acrylic paints to toddlers, but I made sure to warn the parents and had aprons on hand. I would suggest using Tempera paints if you are thinking of doing this with young kids. The paint may not have the same qualities, but everything will be easier!

One thing I can’t resist when offering a playful painting activity is using toys and wacky painting tools in addition to brushes. It’s so much fun for toddlers and offers everyone a new perspective on what it means to paint.

For this set up, I got the trays, cars, and a few kitchen tools at a Dollar Store. The other wacky painting tools are called Funky Brushes (affiliate link). I would have also offered foam rollers if I didn’t care too much about the end result.

Here’s a kid checking out one of the Funky Brushes!

Another wacky painting tool… this one is a basting brush from a Dollar Store.

Bubble Print Canvas

This collaborative bubble print canvas was so much fun, even if the wind was not cooperating! For this project, we used raw (un-primed) canvas, masking tape, bubble solution, bubble wands, and liquid watercolors.

I first wrote the words “Make A Wish” in masking tape, then mixed bubble solution with a little liquid watercolor to make six different cups of colored bubbles. If you use too much watercolor, it can dilute the bubbles, making it harder to blow a bubble. When this happened, I just added a squirt of dish soap and the bubbles worked again!

The idea is for everyone to make a wish, then blow a bubble onto the canvas. If it hits the canvas, the colored bubble will pop and make a print. When the canvas is covered with bubbles, the words will be revealed using a tape resist technique.

The strong wind was blowing the bubbles all over the place, so we eventually had to incorporate some splatter painting to get more color on there. We also wanted to make sure that the words would stand out once we peeled the tape off, so I had a few kids help to go over the edges of the tape with a watercolor and a paintbrush.

After the event, we peeled off the tape and… voila! We hope the Make-A-Wish foundation enjoys their new art piece :)

Below is the final community painting piece. Plae was excited to keep the mural and hang it in their office so we decided to incorporate their name into the finished piece. Thanks to a great suggestion from Meri Cherry, I used this cool technique to spray-paint their name over one part of the canvas. To do this, I cut out each letter from thick paper, placed it on the wet paint, spray-pained around the edges, and then peeled them off (very similar to the tape resist technique).

After seeing everyone so engaged in this project, it is a true representation of play, family, and community.

Thanks Make-A-Wish Foundation for bringing us along on this fun ride and thanks to the community for making 13 more kids’ wishes come true.