7 Fun Painting Process Art Ideas for Kids

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Painting Ideas for Kids

Lots of fun painting activities for kids coming up! ‘Can we get the paints out?’ is a question that always has me sighing a little inside – it conjures up ideas of LOTS of mess, messy children, messy table and often messy floor! But recently, I’ve been trying out some different process painting activities with my preschooler and do you know what? I’ve learnt to love the paint! Seeing my son’s little face light up when he’s exploring with paint reminds me how quickly he’ll grow and how soon the messiness recedes. I’m also trying to remember he is washable and how important it is I ignore the mess and help him play and develop his creativity! What’s been lovely about exploring different fun painting ideas for kids is that quite often the older, school age kids come home and want to join in! I love a good process art project to try with the kids so here are our all-time favourite process art painting activities for kids of all ages that are super fun!

Painting Activities for Kids

Bubble Painting

This painting activity is probably best suited to kids aged 3/4+, just so they’re old enough to know not to suck up the paint and to blow it – they’ll get quite a shock otherwise!!

All you need for Bubble Painting is:

• Bubble Mixture or washing up liquid
• Non-toxic Paint (we like these paints here as they are washable!)
• Cups or glass jars
• Paper (watercolour paper works particularly well if you have any handy but all paper works)
• Straws (we used paper straws but any straws will work. Paper ones do get a little soggy after a while. Try using these to save the environment.)

How to do Bubble Painting

1. Mix half a cup of water with a good dollop of washing up liquid (or bubble mixture). Let your kids go wild blowing bubbles (they shouldn’t need much encouragement. This is the one time that it’s OK to blow bubbles in your drink!) Obviously, they should be careful not to suck or they will have a horrid taste in their mouths.

2. Once they’ve produced a decent amount of bubbles, they should take their paper and carefully place it over the cup on top of the bubbles to create the circled imprint. Repeat over and over with different colours to make pretty prints! We used ours as a handmade card but they’d make equally good wrapping paper too!

Elastic Band Splatter Painting

This is a messy painting idea for kids activity but oh-so-much-fun! It also doubles as a music activity because you can make a guitar tune when you splatter – just be sure to cover all surrounding surfaces as this paint can travel far!

What you will need for Elastic Band Splatter Painting:

• Elastic Bands
• Paint
• Tins or old Tupperware or plastic box
• Paintbrush
• Paper that completely fits the tins

1. Place the elastic bands over your tin or Tupperware/ plastic box to make a guitar, have some fun strumming it for a while before moving on!

2. Paint the elastic bands with different coloured paint. Carefully slide your paper underneath the elastic bands and into your tin. Strum away! As you ping the elastic bands, the paint should splatter everywhere and make a cute pattern! My kids had no idea what I was doing when I first started painting the elastic bands – you should have seen their faces after the first ping!

Rain Painting

A great painting idea for kids for rainy days!

For Rain Painting with kids, you will need:

• Acrylic Paint – we used this paint from Amazon
• Watercolour Paper

This activity works best in light rain or on grass after if has rained. It even works with dew, so you don’t always need rain to rain paint!

Put small drops of acrylic paint on your watercolour paper. Or you can squeeze the paint into a pattern or picture – you just need some thick paint in some places. Place the paper out in the rain or lay the paper on wet grass. Leave the paper until it is soaked through – the colours will swirl and mix to create a unique piece of art. Just be careful not to leave your piece of paper for too long or your colours will run away altogether!

Painting with Pipettes

Another great painting activity is to try using pipettes to drop paint or watercolour ink or liquid watercolours drops onto paper and see the pretty patterns develop.

String Painting

String painting is an easy painting idea for kids as it can be done in so many different ways – there are tons of variations! The one below works well with young children but you might want to try this Pulled Art String Painting – twitchetts for mesmerizing art pieces for older kids.

For String Painting with kids as a fun painting activity you will need:

• String or wool
• Paint
• Paper
• Paintbrush

Pressed String Painting

Start by painting your string and placing it between a folded piece of paper. Fold the paper down and press hard – when you open it up, you’ll have a beautiful piece of symmetrical art.

Pulled String Art

For this variation, start as above – paint the string, covering it in paint and place it between a folded piece of paper. Keep the paper folded with one hand on top of it and with the other hand, gently pull the piece of string out.

Lastly, you can try covering the string in paint and then swirling it around on a piece of paper. My toddler had lots of fun with this one in particular!

How to Make Puffy Paint

Puffy paint is a painting activity idea which is lots of fun for kids – playing with shaving foam is one of my 8 year old favourite activities! Again, there’s lots of different variations on this but this is our favourite as it dries nice and puffy! Here’s what you’ll need for Puffy Painting with kids.

• Shaving Foam (not gel)
• Paint
• Flour
• White PVA Glue
• Card or cardboard

Mix equal part of flour and white glue and then add three times the amount of shaving foam to that mixture. (For example – three cups of shaving foam to one cup of flour and one cup of glue.) Don’t mix too well – you still want the air bubble popping up! Divide the mixture into 4 bowls and add different paint colours to each. Stir well and ta dah! You have puffy paint. You can paint or spoon this mixture to make your picture or you can use an icing bag to squirt the mixture to make a picture using puffy lines and dots. Squeezy bottles can also be used – you can buy them here.

The foam paint will take a while to dry – it’s probably best to leave it overnight!

Hope you have fun painting with your kids! If you have any other painting ideas we can try – let us know, we’d love to hear them! You’ll love this art project ideas list for kids!

More Painting Ideas for Kids

For other ideas – you can see how we made salt puffy paint in this post on Making Salt Puffy Paint Fireworks and more puffy paint ideas here with Our Puffy Paint Planets – this is a great way to learn about Space!