Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Painting WITH Eggs

While most people this past weekend were painting eggs, Ryan and I did something a little different. We decided that we would paint WITH eggs. No, we didn't use the eggs as our paint, but I guess you could say we used the egg shells as our paint brushes.

A few weeks ago I had seen a project on Pinterest that looked fun. While I was at the grocery store on Saturday I saw the cartons of eggs were on sale (I would assume because it was Easter weekend and most people had already started coloring their eggs so the store needed to get rid of their surplus). I knew it would be the perfect time to do the project.

Source

See, you use empty egg shells, fill them with paint, and then throw them at a canvas. The splatter that is left is your art piece. We decided to take it a step further and put vinyl letters down, that way when we were done you could remove the letters and see the phrase on the piece.

So Saturday I "blew" the eggs - meaning I poked holes in the two ends of the egg, one a bit larger than the other, and blew the insides out of the shells. (I didn't really look at anything other than the picture on Pinterest, but if I were to do it again I would probably only puncture a hole in one end, but make it large enough to pour the insides out. Once we filled the shells with paint, some of it leaked out of the bottom hole, so only having one hole would prevent this.) After the insides were out, I rinsed the shells with cold water and let them dry for the evening.

These were the "large" holes I poked, the bottoms had a pin sized hole

On our way home from church Saturday night we stopped by Michael's to picked up some paints and the vinyl letters. (Thankfully Ryan already had a blank canvas in the garage that would work perfectly for this project.)


After some Easter events (like hiding plastic eggs for our friends' kids to find, watching the Red Wings lose, and hanging out with great people), it was time to get down to business. We decided on a phrase, "Loved", and got it on the canvas (we weren't sure how much splatter the eggs would have, so didn't want to do too long of a phrase and have it be illegible if there wasn't enough paint).


We took our tools (paint, empty egg shells, canvas, and garbage bag to contain the mess) up to a local park to let the creating commence.

A baseball backstop worked perfectly as a workstation. We filled up the eggs with the different paints we had purchased the day before and were ready to go. (PS We probably filled the eggs between a 1/4 and a 1/3 of the way with paint.)



Filling the eggs


Ryan and I each got six eggs to throw - I went first and he finished it off. We were surprised how much they splattered. It was a ton of fun and the painting turned out great as well.

Throwing of the first egg... 

DIRECT HIT!

SPLAT!

He was pretty pumped to get throwing!

Love you can see some of the paint flying out of the egg on its way to the canvas!




Once we got the canvas home, we realized that there were bits of egg shell in some of the splatter so we used tweezers to pick the big chunks out. We let the paint start to dry a bit before we pealed off the vinyl stickers underneath (some of the areas had a lot of paint and we didn't want it to run into the void spots of the stickers, so gave it a little time to set before pulling them off - but not too much time so that they pulled paint off the canvas. I'd say we probably gave it about 45-60 minutes before taking the stickers off (again with the tweezers).).






We are beyond thrilled with how it turned out! For about $7 ($1.50 for the eggs, $2.50 for the paints, and $4 for the vinyl letters) we had a blast and got a cool piece of art from it.

I'd say it was an EGGCELLENT time!

3 comments:

Danielle said...

This is so cool! I'd love to try this - plus what a fun activity this could be for kids, I bet my little cousins would love it!

Heather @ Heather Runs Thirteen Point One said...

That came out great! What an awesome idea and it makes for a creative/fun little date :)

Anonymous said...

This is awesome! I may do this as a stress reliever! lol I may also remember this as a cute thing to do with my hubby when announcing the sex of our first child later on in life! SUPPERRR CUTE!!! Thank you!