Materials for creativity, features of painting cereals. The best ideas on how to make rice crafts: simple applique, volumetric figures, drawing, touch boxes, applied crafts. Councils of the masters.
Rice crafts aren't just cute kindergarten souvenirs. Learning new techniques with your children will help not only decorate your home, but also develop your child, improve family relationships, and have fun and enjoyable time. If you show your imagination, do-it-yourself rice crafts turn into real art. But in order for the product to please you from the first attempt, you need to understand the intricacies of the work.
What are Rice Crafts?
In the photo, colored rice for crafts
Crafts made from colored rice are actually not a new invention for active parents and their children, but an applied art with a thousand-year history. Large-scale painting of sites is mentioned in Indian myths and legends, and some traditions have survived to this day. So, unmarried girls, in order to attract happiness and good luck to the house, should draw drawings with colored rice before entering. In various regions of India, this art is called rangoli, kolam, muggu. As a basis for the drawing, not only colored rice are used, but also flour, sand and even flower petals.
Beautiful drawings have become a real hallmark of individual regions, and photographs of a unique and at the same time publicly available technique quickly spread around the world. Not surprisingly, many needlewomen liked the idea of adapting a simple but beautiful craft to decorate their own home. With the help of an original technique, a drawing is made, stands or shelves are decorated, and mirrors are decorated. Having studied various approaches to working with the material, you can decorate any household item.
But do-it-yourself rice crafts for children are no less important. The use of various techniques, materials, and in particular a fine-grained base, is an active influence on the fine motor skills of the child. Studies show that about a third of the cerebral cortex is occupied by the projection of the hands. The speech area and attention centers are also nearby. Creating simple crafts with your baby, you do not just massage your fingers or teach you how to work with small objects, but activate the corresponding brain areas. Thus, you help your child develop speech skills, learn colors and their aesthetic combinations, develop fantasy, imagination, perseverance and attention.
Preparing Rice Craft Materials
Indian craftswomen have two techniques for applying a pattern to the area in front of the house - dry and wet. In the first case, a blank outline of the drawing is drawn with chalk, and then the middle is filled with colored rice. In the second, the grains are laid out on a wet base. However, regardless of the technique used, the primary question remains how to paint rice for crafts.
To date, several staining options are available:
- Using natural dyes - beets, carrots, spinach, blueberry juice and other actively coloring foods. With such a dye, you get a completely natural product with a minimum likelihood of allergic reactions. However, it is quite difficult to achieve rich color with natural juices. At the same time, for children's toys, it is better to use bright colors to make it easier for the baby to match the shades.
- Using gouache … The technology of how to paint rice for handicrafts with gouache does not differ much from the principles of working with natural juices, but in this case the grains will have a very bright and rich color. It should be noted that the gouache lays on the base unevenly, the rice grains are rough. Excess paint may peel off during operation, in which case the grains will be sanded, but the brightness of the color decreases.
- Food colors - the color of rice will turn out to be uniform and sufficiently saturated, and the palette is limited only by your choice. Most of these pigments are safe for allergy sufferers. But in order to dye rice for crafts with food coloring, it is necessary to use a significant amount of the product.
If you decide to make a do-it-yourself rice craft for children, pay attention to natural, safe ingredients. And for decorative items, you can use bright synthetic dyes. To color rice, you need to dilute a small amount of paint in water. Then add 1 tablespoon of the colored mixture to the allotted portion of the cereal and stir well. Put the colored rice on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and leave for several hours until the paint is completely dry. You can speed up the drying process if you put the rice in the oven for 20-30 minutes at a temperature of 150 ° C.
Here are a few tips on how to color your diy rice quickly and easily:
- Regardless of the type of dye, use zip bags. Pour rice into such a bag, add colors and stir until you achieve an even color.
- If you do not have zip bags, use gloves while working, as any paint can be transferred to the skin before it dries completely.
- Add a little essential oil to the dye so that the rice, in addition to color, acquires aroma. However, if the material will be used for playing with young children, it is better to refuse strong smells.
The further set of materials and tools for crafts from dyed rice will depend on the technique and creative idea you choose. It is not out of place to have glue, a cardboard base, scissors, brushes for working with glue and clean brushes for "wiping" smudges, frames for finished work and containers for storing the remaining colored rice.
Before making a rice craft, make sure you have a creative workspace ready. Try to clear the entire surface of the table, eliminate possible drafts, turn off the fan or extractor hood above the work area. Also, make sure that no animals or small children have access to the rice so that containers of material do not accidentally tip over.
Important! Even if rice has been colored with natural dyes, it is not edible. If you have some grains left over from your dyed rice crafts, leave the grains in the container for the next creative activity.
Best Rice Crafts Ideas
The creative process begins with an idea. Learning new techniques with your children will help not only decorate your home, but also develop your child, improve family relationships, and have fun and enjoyable time. First, you need to think carefully about the idea, for example, if you want to make a lilac craft from rice, you will need lilac, green, brown rice. And if the bouquet is supplemented with other flowers, then the assortment of colored cereals will have to be expanded, spending a lot of time on drying. If you have a wide palette of colored rice at your disposal, then you need to decide on the working technique, the amount of auxiliary materials will depend on this. For example, an applique will require a base, glue, a decorative frame, and for volumetric sculpting, a plasticine or plastic base. Improving in making rice crafts with your own hands, over time you can move on to the development of complex applied souvenirs.
Rice applique
Applique is one of the easiest techniques for making rice crafts for kids. The work uses a cardboard or paper base (you can take A4 office paper), as well as glue. Draw or print a blank appliqué outline on the sheet. Apply glue to the inside of the outline and gently sprinkle the rice over it. When the workpiece is dry, shake off the unsticked grains.
It is possible to color the sheet not only by pre-printed blanks. A simple craft "Rice Rainbow" is brought to life even without a preliminary printout.
Creation of your own drawing will be no less exciting for the child. Apply glue to a clean sheet and ask your child to color it with rice on their own. If you get an abstract drawing, try to come up with a name, a story for it. Such fun will help develop the imagination and imagination of the baby.
Note! For the first crafts, it is best to print out simple coloring blanks for children of the younger group. Instead of coloring with crayons, it is easily and quickly decorated with rice.
Volumetric sculpting from rice
Crafts from colored rice for children do not have to be done only in the form of a picture. As your skills in working with the material develop and grow, switch to more complex products, for example, three-dimensional figures. For your first job, it's best to use simple geometric shapes. For example, to make an apple from colored rice, you need to mold a base ball out of plasticine, glue it with paper, and only then attach red grains to it.
Gradually, the shape of the base can be complicated, and the craft can be supplemented with auxiliary details. For example, to add realism to the previously created apple, you can attach a leaf made of polymer clay or the same plasticine. Also, rice paintings are complemented with three-dimensional figures to add a 3D effect.
Temporary rice drawing
Temporary do-it-yourself rice paintings can be attributed not to applied art, but to a unique developmental technique. And the base created for such creativity will become a wonderful game for a growing kid. To create a temporary design, you will need a high-sided tray or container and colored rice.
A preschool child can be offered one of three drawing methods:
- Finger drawing - Colored cereals are poured onto the tray in an even layer, and a hand-made article of colored rice appears with a finger.
- In bulk - the child independently chooses the color and amount of rice, pouring grain into a container or tray, as he wishes.
- Stencil - a stencil is applied to the glue or plasticine base. Rice is poured into the holes. This technique is suitable even for very young children.
Although such do-it-yourself rice crafts for children will not last long and will not be able to decorate your home, it is quite difficult to overestimate the benefits of their creation.
Sensor boxes
The sensory box is an educational toy for preschoolers. Older children will find it interesting not only to play with such a box, but also to create it on their own. In this case, the sensory box will be filled with multi-colored cereals, but if you wish, you can put three-dimensional figures inside. For work, a plastic transparent container is used, and the figures are also molded from cereals.
Experienced craftsmen make such rice crafts themed. For example, blue rice (sea) is poured into the container, and fish made of polymer clay, plasticine with rice or plastic toys in the form of submarines are placed inside. It is much more interesting to play with such sensor boxes. However, make sure that small children do not try to taste such "toys".
Applied souvenirs
Crafts made from dyed rice can be not only beautiful, but also useful. School-age children independently or preschoolers together with their parents are engaged in applied art.
Any technique can be used for this. For example, with the help of applique and colored rice, not a sheet of paper is painted, but a photo frame or a box for tea, a mirror frame.
Bulk glass jars also look beautiful, which can be not just a decorative element, but also serve as a non-standard candlestick or stand for bracelets.
Children’s boxes and boxes are also decorated with rice. In order to create a useful craft, you first need to learn the simplest techniques.
Note! Ready-made dyed rice crafts can dry out. The grains cease to adhere to the base, and “bald” gaps appear on the paper. In this case, the picture can be reanimated. To do this, use a thin brush to dot the glue and rice of the desired shade. To keep the craft longer, try to protect it from direct sunlight and excess moisture. In both the first and second cases, the external environment can have a detrimental effect not so much on cereals as on a paper base.
How to make rice crafts - watch the video:
Rice crafts are not just children's fun, but real creativity. The material makes it possible to try out various techniques - from simple temporary ones to combined complex ones. By introducing the child to an interesting method, you will help develop the child's fantasies, and at the same time, as your skill grows, decorate the house with original decorative elements.
