Painting on Foil

I had planned to post this before we left but ran out of time..

About a month ago my nephew celebrated his birthday and the girls made him a transformer inspired robot card using aluminium foil that had been glued onto card then cut into shapes and arranged.

It got me thinking about whether you could paint on foil and get that look of applying gold foil. So here are the different methods we tried. You can skip forward to the end to see our most successful, though you do get some interesting effects in the other method!

Materials

All of these methods were suited to both girls (18m and 3 1/2) and used poster paint and aluminium foil. This is a great way of reusing aluminium foil after cooking. Just rinse, dry and use. I glued the foil on to card from cereal box to make it a little sturdier. You could get interesting effects from painting on foil then using it to wrap around 3D sculptures.

Method 1

Simply paint a picture on the foil. Sorry no picture you'll have to imagine.

Method 2

This time the girls completely covered the foil in paint then drew on a design using a cotton bud. We've used this method before on our glass cutting board and taken prints of it using paper so it was interesting to draw directly on to the picture.

Method 3

Crinkle the foil (perfect after baking potatoes), glue onto card and paint. This was a little more like what I'd imagined though Rainbow just saw it as a challenge filling in all the cracks.

Here is Moonshine. She just loves painting but you can't turn your back on her for a minute or it goes everywhere. Her painting shows the effect I was aiming for with the metal shining through.Method 4

This one we stumbled on by accident when I washed Moonshine's brush midway through a painting. If you use a very wet brush dipped in paint the paint pools in some areas and is repelled in others. I'm not sure why this happens perhaps someone can enlighten me.