I have received several emails for the directions for the watercolor handprint project, so I thought I would post them. Enjoy!
First, the kids traced their hands, with part of their arm, then water colored them. The teacher had each child cut their own. This is up to you. Some of the hands turned out a bit alienish, so having an adult cut them may be preferable.
At home, I painted the canvas. I believe it was a 24x36 inch canvas. First I painted the whole thing blue. I used Acrylic paints. Then I used painter’s tape to section off the area I wanted black, then painted over the tape again in the blue. This keeps it from bleeding. When it was dry, I painted the black. The interior was done with a stipling type brush stroke (basically a quick dab with the end of the brush) with mixing up white and blue. It was really an experiment in progress. When it looked pretty much even, we stopped.
I sprayed each hand with an acrylic gloss sealer so that the watercolors would not bleed during the decoupaging. When they were dry, I laid them out on the canvas to see what would work best. After decided which order to put them in, I cut some of the hand shorter to be the lower ones. I used the decoupage medium to paste the hands on. (I made a "map" of the hands to show where each child's two handprints were and laminated it and stapled it to the back of the canvas.)
When the decoupaged hands were dry, I painted the red acrylic heart a bit off center.
When dry, I used a black Sharpie to write “With Heart and Helping Hands, A Child Can Accomplish Anything…” around the right side of the heart. When I was sure the sharpie would not smear, I painted two coats of decoupage medium across the entire surface.
I've added a few pics of the stages to my Photobucket album.
s356.photobucket.com/albums/oo9/cmay2ck/Class%20Art%20Projects/ 
