Valentine's Process Art (and Swedish Fish)

The girls especially enjoy doing Process Art projects (multi-step art that takes multiple days and often poses options for new directions: what do we do next to make this art beautiful and meaningful?). Claire wanted to do an art project with all of the New York Times newspapers piled up in my office, so we decided to find some colorful pages and paint them with watercolors.

Then, we cut hearts out of the watercolor pages and affixed them to red cardstock. At this point, the valentines still looked unfinished, so we got out the laminator resulting in glossy and firm valentine hearts that can be used as Christmas decorations (with a quick paper-punch hole and ribbon) or cute bookmarks.

For the class valentine exchange, the boys did not want to exchange our homemade hearts (too cool for school!). So Claire opted to wrap her newsprint/watercolor/laminated/cardstock hearts with satin purple ribbon around Swedish Fish. James added a funny sticker "of-FISH-al valentine" to his Swedish Fish. And Thomas added sticker and yellow ribbon. Valentine Bounty!!!