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Painting Pots
Encourage your child's creativity this summer. If you have plants at home, one great project could be getting your child to paint the pots. Pots that hold plants need to be first sealed from the inside. This is done with a sealer, available at any hardware store. Along with a sealer, make sure you buy a brush and a few sheets of sandpaper.
First, your child will need to apply the sealer all over the inside of the pot. The sealer prevents water from leaking outside the pot, and spoiling the painted surface.
Alternatively, you could also get large decorative terracotta vases or urns, that you will not be putting plants in. In this case, you don't need to apply sealer on the inside of the pot.
Buy a sheet of sandpaper and scrub the surface well, so the red colour powders off. Then, wipe it well with a duster and paint all over the outside with white primer.
Once this is done, take a pencil and draw out the design you wish your child to paint, or let your child sketch something from her imagination. It doesn't need to be anything fancy.
You could also skip the sketching step totally, and just paint the pot or urn in a single colour.
What paints should you use? You could use enamel paints if the pot is going to be outdoors. If you plan to keep it indoors, you could even use oil paints. Alternatively, you could even simply sandpaper the urns, apply white primer, and leave it at that. Keep 2-3 urns of different sizes together and place them besides a white wall. The effect can be stunning.
Let your child work on the pots one step at a time. Their first pot could simply be painted in a single colour. This way, the pot would be completed quickly, and your child will be encouraged to paint another one. If the first design itself is very intricate, your child may lose interest and leave it halfway.
After they have completed one pot, they can start work on the next. If they want to paint it a single colour again, that's fine too, but if they want to paint further, you should definitely encourage them to do so.
Encourage them to make the most of their creativity by looking at the entire pot, including the plant in it. If it is a cactus, your child could make a painting of a desert, if the pot holds flowers, your child could paint a little garden on the pot, or your child could paint the pot in a colour that contrasts or matches with the colour of the flowers. So yellow sunflowers can be placed in a bright blue pot, and roses could be placed in a yellow pot.
Do you want handles pasted to the sides on your pot? Get wooden bangles and paste them on either side of your urn. Paint them in a contrasting colour. Of course, these handles are for decorative purposes only - you will not be able to lift the pot with these 'handles', so don't even try!
Happy painting!
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