Bubble Prints with Jellyfish

Today was the last day of my Art Experiment Lab class as well as my summer art series.It's been Wonderful! (I still have plans to post their salt dough pieces and toothpaste and aloe vera batiks soon).
I found many bubble print ideas on Pinterest and decided to use a recipe of dish soap, water and watercolor. Tempera paint, bubble bath and bubble solution were alternatives. This is a great project to use what you have on hand. It's messy! So I'm glad I purchased some disposable aluminum containers to ease clean-up.

Basically the kids mixed a combination of 2 tablespoons of liquid watercolor, about 1 tablespoon of dish soap and 1/4-1/2 cups water in a plastic cup (we adjusted when needed). They taped 5 straws together to give them more "bubble power". Then they began to blow, and as the colored bubbles rose past the lid of the cup, they took their watercolor paper and laid it on top, making a print. I offered a variety of colors that they could swap around. They obviously kept their same straw bundles and rinsed or wiped them before changing to a new color.

These made cool looking organic abstract art pieces all on their own. But I decided to add the element of chalk pastel jellyfish. (Maybe inspired by my daughter's insistence that a jellyfish was ever present during last weeks' body boarding venture) These were done on rice paper to mimic the translucent quality of jellyfish. But given the fragile nature of this paper, basic copy paper would be a fine alternative. The children drew simple jellyfish bodies with chalk pastel, blending in "little circles" and leaving the centers white to mimic the translucent look. They were then cut out, glue "sticked" to their dried bubble prints and then pastel tentacles drawn on top of their bubble art. (K-5th art)

Bubble prints were a real crowd pleaser!

Here are some of their bubble prints on their own - really beautiful actually