Are you and your kids on vacation next week? We all are and I’m so excited to have such an extended break with family and friends.
I know from experience, though, that kids get antsy after a few days at home. So if you and your kids need something fun to work on next week, give these two projects a try.
Winter Snow Paint Scenes
This project has multiple steps but is suitable, really, for any age. My littlest preschoolers made these with beautiful results.
Materials:
Shaving cream (the cheap, white kind- not the blue gel!)
Elmer’s White School Glue
Crayons or Oil Pastels
Watercolors
Watercolor Paper
Drawing Paper
Paint Brushes
Step 1. Draw a line to mark the ground on your watercolor paper. This is your horizon line and must go all the way from the left edge of the paper to the right edge.
Step 2. Using white, light blue, or silver, draw “snowflakes” all over the sky part of your picture. I showed my little ones how to make simple crossed line snowflakes but older children could get more elaborate here.
Step 3. Using blue and purple ONLY, use watercolor to paint the sky. The watercolor will “resist” the wax crayon.
Step 4. On a separate sheet of drawing paper, draw the trees. I set out all the green oil pastels for my kids and stressed that they had to use ALL THE COLORS OF GREEN on ALL THE TREES. This is called using a monochromatic color scheme. They made varying sizes and shapes of triangles then cut them all out carefully. If you don’t have oil pastels, you can use crayons.
Step 5. At this point, your background should be dry. The kids should glue each tree onto their background. To make sure we didn’t end up with floating trees, I told my littles that the base of each tree MUST be touching their ground line.
Step 6. Squirt some shaving cream into a bowl (maybe a cup). Then add an equal amount of glue. Stir this mixture together with a paint brush then let your child paint (or even finger paint) the goopy substance onto the ground of their picture. My kids were only allowed to paint the ground but if you have older children, they could add little bits of snow to the sky for a snow storm or to the trees if they wanted to.
Step 7. Let dry!! When dry, the snow paint is soft and puffy- it will hold its shape exactly as you painted it so encourage some texture making with the paint brush.
You could adapt this project for older children by adding an animal drawing element.
This is a really fun book for kids (and adults!) and give simple instruction on how to draw cute but realistic looking creatures that would look wonderful in these winter scenes. I’d draw these with crayon or oil pastel and then paint them with watercolor.
Next up…
Watercolor Batik
Materials:
Watercolors (preferably crayola brand or a higher quality watercolor- these will provide better results)
Watercolor Paper
Brushes
Table Salt
Step 1. Using highly saturated areas of color, paint a picture with your watercolors.
Step 2. Sprinkle salt onto your picture wherever you want to add the batiked effect and watch what happens!
The salt crystals suck up the pigment from the paint creating a cool effect on the paper. My littles thought this was magical.
I was really surprised with how much my littles liked this project. When we pull out the watercolors, our pictures usually end up a dark mess of blackish brownish soup (because mixing up all the colors is so tempting!) but for some reason, each and every artist was incredibly careful with these paintings, making meaningful marks and being extra careful with their colors. Some kids were dumping on the salt, others were literally sprinkling it on one. grain. at. a. time.
If you loved this project be sure to check out these easy crafts for kids! We all need a few more of these in the idea bank, right?!
Leave a Reply