Malaysian Batik Painting

While on holidays Mimsy and I tried our hand at Malaysian Batik painting.

Mimsy loves doing watercolour painting at home, so it wasn't too difficult to explain how to do it.

We picked our pre drawn designs - flowers for me and an orang utan for Mim. She also wanted to paint a turtle for Juju. Knowing that she would finish hers much quicker than I would, I was all for the idea!

The lovely ladies in the shop explained to us that we needed to paint the cloth with water first, and then use the inks to colour in the various sections of the drawings. The drawings had been made using hot wax, which resists the ink.

We worked hard under the watchful eye of Juju. We were provided with completed examples of the same drawings to guide us and give some inspiration. I used mine as a guide and experimented with similar but different colours. Mim took a more creative approach.

I was pretty impressed with our finished paintings! Not bad for a first effort. I was thinking I might turn Mimsy's into some library bags.

I can see us doing similar paintings in the future - lots of fun, easy clean up and room for plenty of toddler creativity.