It’s highly likely you have “kid art” piling up in a closet somewhere in your home. I know as much as the next mom how those little finger painting projects warm your heart. And then they make you feel way too guilty when faced with tossing them out.
Wouldn’t it be great if your kiddos could make some art you could proudly display in a prominent area of your home? Well, here is your solution. This quick, easy, inexpensive(!) painting project uses a series of small canvases, and it’s guaranteed to blow you away. People will wonder if they’re by an up-and-coming street artist — rather than your up-and-coming preschooler.
Gather your supplies
You won’t require an entire craft cupboard to pull off this project. All you’ll need are a few canvases in the same size — any size and any amount. We used four 12″ x 12″ square canvases. Grab one small bottle of acrylic paint in any color. We selected an aqua blue tone by Delta. Gather a few different size brushes — although just one brush is fine, too. Put down a drop cloth of some kind. I ripped up a bunch of old paper grocery bags. Then find a space where you don’t mind a little mess, although depending on your child’s age, this can actually be relatively mess-free.
Let’s get painting!
Literally all you have to do is give your kid a brush and some of the paint and let them go wild. The idea here is for the piece to be abstract so they don’t need to paint anything in particular. In this case, my two-year-old essentially just swiped the various brushes up and down to make vertical lines. I kind of rotated the canvas around when the paint got too concentrated in one area and took it away and gave her another one when I felt she reached the right amount of paint to white space ratio for my liking.
Keep your sanity by giving them one canvas at a time, and you’ll soon see that once they get in the zone, it’ll end up looking like a beautiful series of the same technique (as the final product shows below). Once you get them framed (we are currently waiting on deep-set metallic square frames I ordered online), you can put them up anywhere you like and let the compliments roll in.
Change the project to suit your needs
You could easily pull off this project with two or more kids. Give them all a different size brush — but the same paint color. Have them work on a series of larger canvases together or have each of them make 2-3 small canvases on their own. Mix them all up when the time comes to hang.
The beautify of this project is in the one paint color, which keeps everything so uniform and sophisticated. Have fun with it! And if you do attempt this project with your little ones, please share it on Facebook or Instagram and don’t forget to tag us. We’d love to see your masterpieces!
