Winter Art Project You'll Love

Check out the art project my kindies whipped up as part of their holiday gift to their families!  Aren't they pretty?!  I think these would be fun to do anytime during the Winter and they'd look beautiful hanging in the hall or in your classroom.  But if you're looking for a beautiful holiday gift, these are wonderful.  I've done this project many years with my classes and would definitely recommend it!  :)  Complete directions below...

So here's how it's done!  

Time:  It takes a few days to complete to allow time for the tissue paper to dry.

Materials needed:

• Tissue paper squares and/or strips (I accidentally had a few strips in my bin and they ended up looking so pretty- I'm definitely going to do more strips next year!)
• Bottles of glue
• Fat paint brushes
• Blue watercolor paint
• White tempera paint
• Q-tips
• Two 9 x12 sheets of white construction paper per student
• One 12 x 16 sheet of colored construction paper per student (12 x 18, trimmed a little to make a mat for the finished project.... I chose black)

Day 1: 

Squeeze glue onto the paper and brush it around.  Don't be afraid to be generous-- it feels weird to squirt out so much glue because we normally don't got crazy with it like that (Teacher Tip: Some years I've made a mix of glue and water for kids... which was extra work and kinda complicated to distribute so this year I tried just using straight glue and wah-la!  It worked perfectly fine and made my life easier.  Maybe the mix is a good option if you're low on glue, but otherwise I'd vote for keeping it simple.).  

Stick tissue paper squares onto the glue.  Teach kids to make the tissues overlap and touch... don't leave a lot of white spaces.  Then squirt more glue over the tissue and spread it around so there aren't any corners sticking up.  

Teacher Tip:  To make things easier, my class agreed to not put names on these and just work together for the class to be able to share the finished tissue art.  I'd definitely recommend this! 

Once the page is pretty covered, let it dry overnight.

I thought the brushes would be tough to wash out, but "painting" them onto the bottom of the sink under running water helped and it went pretty quickly. 

Day 2

Prep for you:  Cut the dried tissue paper pages into various sizes of triangles.   

Give kids a new piece of white construction paper and have them paint a wavy or straight (artist's choice) blue line around the middle of their page.  Paint half blue for the sky and leave the other half white for the snowy ground.  

Let these dry (watercolor doesn't take long).  Later that same day or the next day call kids over to the triangle pile (a few kids at a time) and have them pick three triangle "trees" they like.  

They could probably glue them themselves, but personally, I put the glue on, handed the triangles back to the kids and let them decide where them stick down.

The last step was letting them use a q-tip to add white tempera paint "snow" to the scene.  

Finally, I'll be gluing them onto the larger black rectangle to make a frame around the artwork.

We usually use butcher paper, glued together and made into big decorated paper "envelopes" to send these home as gifts.  Beautiful!  I think families will treasure these.

Here are a few more examples as well as a video I made a long time ago of another year's finished artwork.