I have been doing these big colour & play drawings for my kids over the last couple years… I find attention spans of toddlers & preschoolers can dwindle pretty quickly, so I draw a big picture that we can work together on a bit each day until it’s finished. We start off with a slice of recycled paper from a big pad, butcher paper or big pieces of coloured paper.  My daughter loves mixed media, so the markers, crayons & pencils all come out. When the colouring’s done the glitter or cut paper come into play. (I love the mix of kid scribble and adult colouring… I try to stick to the big boring areas like sky while Hera does the fun bits, makes the kid’s part really stand out).
The play aspect comes in with stickers and paper dolls. Kids love to decorate and stick (and peel, and stick, and peel) stickers, and this big play surface is fun for their imagination. Once they get unsticky, we glue them to stiff paper and cut them out and reuse them as paper dolls.

(This is the first one we ever did, Hera drew the first hill and the rest evolved from there!)
A few of the big colour & play drawing ideas we have done (again and again!) are :

• • Underwater scenes (Octonauts!)
• • Castles (with paper princess stickers)
• • Roads with hills and ponds (Great one for driving cars on afterwards!)

Once all the creative play is done, the big drawings make great posters for rooms. And once they come down from the wall, they can be potato-stamped to make into home made wrapping paper.

(Lifecycle of this craft : Tree > Paper > Big Colour & Play Drawing > Poster > Wrapping Paper to ?!)

I stumbled across this tip at Stubby Pencil Studios… breathe life back into dried out water based markers by dipping them in water! I had a bag full of dried out markers I hadn’t quite found another use for, so gave it a go. The method I used was :

• • Put just enough water in the bottom of a container cover the tips of the markers (In hindsight, tall glasses would have worked better as they won’t tip!)
• •  Dip the marker tip in and leave it for a few minutes.
• • Remove from marker and put the cap back on. I only waited a few more minutes before testing them out, and they worked wonderfully.

Not sure how many times this trick will work, but my daughter was pleased having a dozen old markers back into the fold and has been colouring up a storm! (And for those curious, the coloured water from runoff ink was too watered down to reuse as paint.)