Celebrate Green Blog

Here’s a guest post from Marilyn Brackney, host of The Imagination Factory. Enjoy! By the way, as with all craft projects, we encourage you to choose non-toxic paints and other supplies and of course reuse paper. If purchasing new, a good source for paints and markers is Clementine Art.

Also called the Festival of Lights, Hanukkah has been celebrated by people of the Jewish faith for centuries. This is a time for family gatherings, reciting the Hanukkah blessing, lighting the candles of the menorah, and sharing meals together.

Gifts are exchanged, one on each night of the eight-day festival. You can have fun making art, and you’ll save money if you design your own wrapping paper and gift containers. Reusing paper to do so, will help save trees and landfill space, too. Try to think of a different way to reuse paper to wrap gifts for each night of Hanukkah.

You can use many papers without decorating them at all. For example, old road maps and the color comic section of the newspaper make great wrapping papers. Some other types of paper sources that can be reused just as you find them include brown and decorative sacks, phone book, magazine, calendar, and catalog pages, wallpaper sample books, school papers, canceled stamps, book jackets, paper towel tubes, and salt and oatmeal cereal boxes.

In addition to reusing papers, the following are just a few of the ways you can hand decorate materials.

Oodles of Doodles
Using ink or a marker, make loops all over a piece of scrap paper, newsprint, or pre-consumer waste paper. Choose symbols, such as a menorah, dreidel, or Star of David, and draw them inside the loops. Add other icons, and fill the page with the symbols. Color some of the designs with markers or crayons.

Repeat Design
Use a piece of newsprint or a sheet of pre-consumer waste paper to make a repeat design. Divide the paper into long rectangles, and draw two, three, or four Hanukkah symbols or designs over and over with pens and markers. Color some of the designs.

Polished Crayon
Make a stained glass design by dividing a piece of preconsumer waste paper into many sections or shapes with a black marker. Color the shapes heavily. Polish the design by gently rubbing the colors with a soft rag.

Wet-in-wet Watercolor
Tape a piece of tissue gift wrap paper to a scrap of foam core. Soak the paper by brushing or sponging water onto it. Using watercolor, choose either cool colors (blues, greens, and purples) or warm colors (reds, yellows, and oranges) to paint an abstract design. Add interest to your painting by sprinkling rice or kosher salt into the puddles here and there. When it’s dry, gently brush off the rice or salt.

Resist Painting
Choose a piece of white waste paper. Using crayons or oil pastels, draw a picture or fill the page with Hanukkah symbols, leaving some of the paper untouched. Color the symbols heavily. Wet the entire page with a sponge, and paint a wash of blue watercolor over everything.

Spatter Painting
Wear a paint shirt for this one, and cover your work area with newspapers! Cut out some simple shapes from scrap paper. Lay the shapes on a piece of paper like newsprint or preconsumer waste paper. Dip an old tooth brush into poster paint, and spatter paint the page by drawing a craft stick across the bristles toward yourself. Continue till the whole sheet is covered. Remove the shapes.

String Painting
Dip all but two inches of a fourteen-inch length of string into acrylic, poster paint, ink, or watercolor. Lay it across a piece of paper, leaving the “clean” part hang over the edge. Place another paper on top of the first one, and holding your hand on top of the paper and string, pull the string back and forth and then out. Repeat with other colors, if you wish. Be sure to use a clean string for each new color.

Printmaking
Newspaper pages with very small type like a stock exchange report page or the newspaper’s classified section make good paper for prints. Have an adult help you cut a simple design into a carrot or potato, and make repeat design prints. You can use objects like sponges, spools, and sticks to make prints, too. Be sure to use water-based printing inks. Red ink looks especially attractive on black and white newspapers.

Stenciling
Cut a simple shape from wax paper or the backing from a self-adhesive label. Place over a piece of scrap paper, and use acrylic, poster paint or watercolor to paint the shape’s edges with a stencil brush or a sponge. Repeat till the paper is covered with designs.

Rubbing
Lay a piece of newsprint or other thin type of paper over a raised surface such as linoleum or other texture. Remove the paper covering from a crayon. Holding the paper down with one hand and using the broad side of the crayon, make a rubbing by coloring the sheet. Use many colors side by side for a more interesting effect.

Rubber Stamping
Rubber stamps are available in many different designs. Find some with Hanukkah symbols like the menorah or dreidel. Before stamping, decide if you want an overall pattern or one, which is more formal. When you have a plan in mind, stamp away on newsprint or other piece of waste paper. If you wish, use markers or colored pencils to color the designs when they’re dry.

Marbling
Repurpose a man’s white handkerchief using the ancient craft of marbling. Wrapping a gift with fabric will allow the recipient to reuse it, too.

Aluminum Foil
To reuse clean, aluminum foil, loosely wad it up into a ball. Carefully undo the material, and smooth it out onto your work surface. The foil will be left with an interesting, wrinkled texture.

Tomorrow, in Part 2 Marilyn offers many more great ideas.

This is a guest post by Marilyn J. Brackney, a professional artist and teacher. She hosts The Imagination Factory, an award winning website that encourages children to reuse and recycle materials to create art.

Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are mother and daughter and authors of Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and founders of Green Halloween®.