The Grown-Up's Guide to Painting with Kids: 20+ fun fluid art and messy paint projects for adults and kids to make together

The Grown-Up's Guide to Painting with Kids is a tutorial and resource guide filled with fun liquid art (paint pouring) projects for kids (and their adults). Released 2nd June 2020 by Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 128 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.

I noticed something when going through this book. While it certainly is full of guided creative tutorials for painting with kids, I noticed *myself* opening up and not stifling myself at all during the process. This is an incredibly valuable side-effect of taking the focus off of ourselves and letting the process happen. I heartily recommend doing these fun exercises for us personally before we try them out with students or our own kids. I suffer a lot from the "instant expert" expectations for myself (happily, I don't do it to anyone but myself.. but it's still a drag, not feeling like my own art is "good enough"). This little book helped me get over that feeling a little bit. 

Paint pouring is completely serendipitous and not under the artist's control in a lot of ways. That makes it perfect for concentrating on the process and creativity. The author uses about 15% of the page content giving a good introduction to the tools, materials, and techniques and then leads into the tutorials. A lot of the prompts are "what happens when we..." and include some really pretty finished projects like a cloud mobile with randomly colored raindrops.

Each of the projects includes an intro/description, tools and materials, and step by step photo tutorial. The photography is clear and abundant. There are color photos on every page. Alternate steps and enhancements are included for many of the activities.

This would make a superlative choice for a staying home activity, as well as a great idea for a library or classroom activity (when we can gather together again).

Five stars. There are a lot of good ideas here.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.