Spray Paint Archives - The Art Pantry

September 24, 2019 by Megan Schiller

New Take on The Family Canvas Challenge

*I wrote this post 3 months ago and am just now getting it up. My resurgence of creative energy at that time was short-lived, but I’ve been getting stronger and it’s coming back more and more*

June 24th 2019: After 6 months of illness and recovery, I’m finally having a resurgence of creative energy! I still don’t have a ton of physical energy, but I wanted to get back in the studio with my girls and try to finish our canvases we started in November.

Whenever I run the Family Canvas Challenge, I encourage families to collaborate on a shared canvas, but working individually can be just as great. Because we’ve made 3 family canvases together, we often try something new each time to keep it interesting.

Layered Canvas Family Project

This layered canvas turned out to be one of my favorite art projects I have done with my kids. It started off as a holiday Advent activity and turned into something we will be doing all year long. The basic idea is to work on one canvas over many days, adding a new material every time. Because it started off as an Advent activity, each material was a surprise, hidden inside of a bag for that specific day. This quickly became a fun game where they would try to guess what the next material would be. If a material didn’t fit inside the bag (like on day 1), I would set it up like an Invitation To Create and surprise the girls that way. Although we tried to do this every day during early December, I quickly realized that it was going to have to be every other day- and sometimes we’d go a few days without working on it. This made it a much more enjoyable experience and helped me realize we could continue on indefinitely! Here is what our process looked like…