Easy Peasy Easter Art for Toddlers

Toddlers love sticking their fingers into stuff and making a mess, so why not let them at it and make a bit of Easter art out of it? This is how easy it is.

You will need:
Paper
Paint
A small amount of water
At least one child
A waterproof fine point black marker pen

Step 1: Get out some paints (poster paints are good but even those little watercolur sets work too) and a little plastic cup of water. Put an apron or bib on your child to avoid them getting paint on their clothes when they inevitably wipe their hands on what they are wearing.

Step 2: Lay a few sheets of paper on the table. White or pastel colours show up the paint best, I find. 

Step 3: Have your child dip their index fingertip into the water then into the paint. If you are using poster paints it is a good idea to put a small amount onto a plate. If you are using watercolours, get the child to rub their wet finger on their chosen colour of paint until it is well coated with colour.

Step 4: Make fingerprints scattered all over the pages, reloading the fingers with fresh paint as needed.

Step 5: Leave the paint to dry. Wash the child's hands and put away the water and paints. 

Step 6:  For chicks - draw eyes, beaks and wings on the fingerprints
For bunnies - draw eyes, nose, mouth, ears and a fluffy tail on the fingerprints

Step 7: Now you can decide what to do with your little works of art. The ideas I like are:
- Hang the pages up as they are

- Cut out the best creatures and make Easter cards

 - Cut out some of your favourites and glue them to little paper bags. You can then fill these with chocolate eggs and give them as gifts at Easter. As an alternative, you can do the fingerprints straight onto the bag, as we did here:

A few photos of this year's egg decorating with the kids

Here are a few more details and photos of our preparations for Easter over the last week or so. 

These are white eggs, hard boiled and then submerged in IRIS dyes for various lenghts of time. We made the pale green by mixing some of the yellow and blue dyes. The white stars were created by placing stickers on the eggs after boiling but before dyeing. More on this method below. 

The pink stars were created by dyeing an egg pink and leaving it to dry. Then we placed some star stickers on it and submerged it in the blue dye. This turned the pink  shell purple but the areas covered with stickers remained pink. The white star is the original egg shell colour.

Preparing beetroot for making a natural dye.

Beetroot is a brilliant natural dye, as anyone who has ever accidentally dropped beetroot juice in their clothing will know. To make a dye from it, chop fresh beetroot into chunks (you can leave the skin on) and boil it in enough water to cover it. Turn off the heat and leave the beetroot to infuse the water. After a few hours, strain and jar the water, You can place hard boiled eggs or just egg shells into the dye and leave them there for several hours to take on the colour. 

The same method can ebe used to make a dye with onion skins. You need to use quite a lot of onion skins but the results are pretty, eypecially if you use stickers on white eggs.

Beetroot dye

Take an egg.

Stick star-shaped stickers onto it.

Place it in the dye and leave it until the desired colour has been reached.

Dyed with a mixture of red and brown onion skins.

Brown egg shells dyed with homemade onion skin dye.

 

White egg shells dyed with homemade beetroot dye. I love the shade that the inside of the eggs has taken on here.

Our cloth Easter bunnies made of scraps of fabric and stuffed with teddybear filler.  I had planned to make several of these as gifts but unfortunately just didn't have the time to make more than this.