Scales and Spots, easy and effective fingerprint sensory artworks

 My daughter recently received a wonderful book called Finger Stemplen für kleine Künstler, which translated means finger stamping for the little artist. As you can see the how-to book came with a great set of ink pads so we could try it out straightaway.

 

 Having opened it, my daughter and I sat together and had a look through the book to see which of the examples we would like to try ourselves. It quickly became quite clear to me that the book's ideas were probably a little too advanced for my child to do without a lot of help from an adult. I didn't let that stop us though. This had the potential of being a really great sensory art experience.

 
I started thinking about what fingerprints can look like and I realised they could easily be spots or scales on animals. This lead to a lovely brows through Google images looking at pictures of animals with scales and spots. For scales we found dinosaurs, fish, dragons, lizards and snakes. For spots we found cheetahs, giraffes, leopards and Dalmatians.

At first my little one started drawing her own dragon. See photo below. She used fingerprints for the eyes and then started to fill its belly with green fingerprints for the scales.

When it came to fish, she asked mummy to draw some for her. I drew some simple fish with bubbles which she once again filled with fingerprints to create their scales. This was very effective when she used more than one colour. The little monkey also decided to put fingerprints in all the air bubbles which was a nice touch.

Here are some photos of other artworks that we finished.

I think these would make really nice personalised cards for Mother's Day or Father's Day. To have your child's fingerprint immortalised in a beautiful artwork like this I think makes for a beautiful gift and all you would have to do is frame it. Like the giraffe picture above, you can have a mama and baby animal standing together or a papa and baby. Below is something I played around with in Photoshop to see what a Father's Day card may look like.

You don't have to make it in Photoshop, you could easily cut it out and glue it to some beautiful card. There are available already pre-cut and pressed cards you can buy from craft stores. Some have a window on the front of the card which you could stick the artwork behind.

Such a simple sensory art project, yet so effective that any child of any age can create a masterpiece within minutes! If you don't feel comfortable drawing the animals yourself just print out some colouring pages from the web! I hope you get to try it.

P.S do have some wipes ready on the side, it can get messy!

Until next time, happy printing and happy playing.