A while back my daughter and I had fun experimenting with yarn and canvas to create a few interesting pieces of abstract resist art. I stumbled across those pieces the other day and remembered how much fun they were to make. Looking at them, gave me idea. I love birch trees and thought that this technique might work well for making birch tree landscape paintings. With a little help from my little girl, we played around with this method. We love the results and are excited about how simple and pretty these are. 
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What you will need:
Canvas boards or canvas
Acrylic or tempura paint
Yarn
Cotton balls
Q-tips
Sharpie
Directions:
For our project we used a 5X7 canvas board. The smaller board was a great choice for my 5-year-old to work with, but you can choose a size that best suits your needs.
We started by wrapping yarn around the board vertically. Our wraps varied from between 8-15 wraps around. The yarn does not need to be perfectly straight up and down. It actually looks better if some are wrapped at a slant.
When we were satisfied with how much we wrapped, we cut our yarn and secured it loosely in the back of the canvas.
I helped my daughter with securing it in the back
My daughter readjusted her yarn to space them out the way that she wanted them.
I showed my daughter how to tuck a cotton ball into a clothes pin. We used the cotton balls to dip into the paint and then dab on the canvas. It is important to just dab the paint on and not to brush it back and forth. You can form your background scene by layering the sky on top of the ground like I did or you can take a more lively approach and just be free with your color like my daughter.
For best results cover your canvas completely.
When you have finished dabbing, remove your yarn. You can also choose to use Q-tips to dot on leaves or snow or a flower onto your background. You can add a little extra paint to the bottom of your painting and cover part of your trees to give the appearance of trees set further back. Play around with different ideas.
Let the paint dry.
Use a Sharpie to draw small hash marks where the yarn was removed.
And presto a beautiful birch painting.
When my daughter had finished her painting, she was pretty proud of it. She wanted to make sure that I could make one just like her, so she even made me a step by step drawing of all of her steps. Oh my heart!!
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