Frugal Fun: Inexpensive Art Supplies

Christina at Northern Cheapskate brings up a good point in her post, Does My Frugality Hinder my Kids' Creativity? In these tight economic times, it's hard to rationalize spending money on kids' art supplies, but since we're spending more time at home, it's one of the activities that keeps everyone busy and happy. Here are some ideas for inexpensive art supplies you can use to encourage creativity with your kids without adversely affecting your budget:

• Use pasta to make necklaces or glue down patterns or pictures such as in the photo above. If you want to be fancy, you can color your pasta using rubbing alcohol and food coloring, or you can leave it au naturel. Of course, you'll want to keep an eye on the grocery sales and promos to keep this a frugal art supply. In the past year, I've gotten Wacky Mac (already colored so you don't have to) FREE at Shoppers, and I've bought Barilla Plus for pennies at Safeway.
  
  
• Use The Drugstore Game to collect art supplies. With coupons and ECB deals at CVS, I snagged several bags of cotton balls and cotton swabs for FREE. Both are great for projects--cut the cotton swabs in half and they're perfect glue-appliers for toddlers. You can also use them for "dot painting" which stretches the paint you have instead of slopping it on as some toddlers will do. We use cotton balls to make pictures of clouds and other "fluffy" things like sheep. If you're brave enough, you can even get some free/almost-free shaving cream and let them use it for fingerpainting in a cookie sheet, in the bathtub, or paint with it as The Artful Parent suggests.
  
  
• If you think Playdough only comes in those cute yellow containers, you're in for a treat. Your kids can help you make the dough, with lessons in how to read a recipe and lots of measuring and mixing as part of the fun. Fruity Play Dough at The Motherload and Homemade Playdough at Skip to My Lou are great recipes to try.
  
  
• Use recyclables you have around the house. Just a few weeks ago, I shared this Recycled Puzzle project with you. We used the cardboard from some empty cereal boxes and pictures from magazines, plus a little glue. You could use the same materials to make shape, number, or letter cards to play games with your toddler or preschooler.
  
  
• When potatoes go on sale for $1-2 for a 5 lb. bag, I don't mind losing a few to potato print painting. Use a cookie cutter or knife to cut shapes in the potato, dip it in paint, and print away, as shown in the photo above.
  
  
• And last, an old standby, the cardboard box. If your online shopping has been cut back and you don't have an excess of boxes, I bet your neighbors do. Just ask for their extra boxes, and send the kids to work with art supplies (with you in charge of any cutting that needs to be done). Mom's Marbles has a great list if you need some inspiration.

What do you have around the house that you can use for art projects? How do you use inexpensive or FREE materials creatively?