Diffuser art

 (Goblin is 4 years old)
(This post contains an Amazon affiliate link)

Recently my mum gave me a bunch of art supplies that had been sitting in her cupboard since my sister and I were kids. Amongst these treasures were our diffusers. I've been meaning to try them with Goblin and today I finally did. 

For anyone who hasn't seen these before they are basically just two metal straws that meet at a right angle. You put one end in a bottle of indian ink and you blow hard down the other. The air passes over the top of the tube that is in the ink and it pulls the ink up the tube and sprays it across the area you are pointing at. You can make a diffuser using a straw and a piece of cardboard to create a 90 degree angle, but they are also very cheap to buy. Here is an Amazon link to a Spray Diffuser for Paints and Inks. 

If you place a solid object, or in our case a cardboard cut out, in front of the area you are spraying you create a void. As Goblin is obsessed with vehicles, our cardboard cut outs were planes and helicopters. You don't have to have any great artistic skill to create a template because you can just trace a picture.  

This activity can be done with any child who can blow hard down a straw. But be warned. The spray goes wide and the ink will stain. To avoid this we turned a large cardboard box on its side and pinned the A3 paper to the bottom (which was now the vertical side). The edges of the card board box served as protection keeping the ink contained in the box. We used tiny bits of double sided tape to attach the cardboard template to the paper, then Goblin blew hard and I helped him turn the diffuser so we covered the whole area needed. We waited until the ink was dry to remove the template. I love our results. This activity also works really well using leaves for the void, and more than one colour ink to build layers.