This week we made vibrant mosaic picture frames out of paint chips. For the last year I’ve been running across really great ideas for paint chip projects on a variety of amazing kids craft sites like Happy Hooligans and The Chocolate Muffin Tree and decided to adapt the idea into a holiday art project.
The potential for collage with paint chips is endless. The colors are rich and saturated (even in the pale spectrum) and the weight of the paper is nice and thick.
Here is a handy list of supplies needed:
- paint chips
- Background paper. I used file folders (cut in half but you could also use heavyweight paper, tag board, poster board, cereal box, or cardboard.)
- glue stick
I prepped paint chip pieces by cutting length wise with the stripes of color and also across the stripes utilizing the white in between.
Some children followed by mosaic examples by leaving space in between their pieces.
Others chose to overlap, stack, or butt their pieces right up next to each other.
I showed several examples of both monochromatic or rainbow color schemes and let the children decide which route they wanted to take.
Our second holiday project was making glitter cards.
Our supply list included:
- construction paper
- tag board (you could use any paper but better results will come with thicker since it’s less likely to buckle under the moisture of the white glue)
- white glue
- glitter
I prepped the paper by cutting down white tag board into pieces that were slightly smaller than 1/4 of a 9×12 sheet. I also cut construction paper in half to be folded as the base of the card.
We first applied the tag board to folded piece of construction paper with a glue stick. (I love the Elmer’s washable glue sticks in purple which dry completely clear).
Next we drew lines, dots, doodles or images with white glue being careful not create huge puddles.
The last step was the best, sprinkling glitter to our hearts content. We shook off excess glitter onto newsprint and I recycled it back into plastic salt shakers as a rainbow mix to be used by the next students..