Here are two simple squirrel art projects which you can adapt for all ages of children and result in something that the kids will be proud to display! These pages have been used in the squirrel art projects below:
Two Simple Squirrel Art Project Ideas
By Shelly
One of my kid’s favourite animals has to be the squirrel. The two of them love spotting the squirrels in our garden or when we are out for walks. And lately we have been noticing our local squirrels are a lot more active in our garden so I thought it might be fun to do some squirrel-themed art.
We like the squirrel frame page from Activity Village so we thought we would use that as our base and add a bit of texture with our tissue paper.
Scrunching Tissue Paper
The first idea was to do a combination painting / tissue paper squirrel. The kids started with painting the squirrel’s body (we went for a brown / red colour). Then we added some scrunched up tissue paper for the tail. We have found it easier to apply the glue to the paper and then add the tissue paper (trying to glue the tissue paper directly never seems to end well for us as the tissue paper tears and it is just a lot more messier).
Squirrel painted and with tissue paper added to the tail
Once the tail was done we decided that a plain white background was not good enough for our Squirrel so the sky was painted and some green tissue paper added as grass.
Squirrel with sky background painted and tissue paper grass added
I really liked the end result.
And maybe you have the same unique squirrels that we have in our garden – Rainbow Squirrels!
Rainbow squirrel!
Bleeding Tissue Paper
We also tried some bleeding tissue paper. My daughter loves doing this. We use one of paint brushes to wet a piece of card and then add our tissue paper squares. If the tissue paper does not stick to the paper or look wet enough you may need to paint some more water over the top - the tissue paper needs to be wet for the colour to bleed onto the card. Be warned - when the tissue paper gets wet the colour runs so the kids will end up with colour on their hands and your table surface could also get some colour on it. Always have a plastic cloth or some old paper underneath!
Busy applying tissue paper squares to wet card
We normally let our card dry for a bit and then peel the tissue paper off. You are left with a lovely coloured piece of paper with its own unique pattern on it. My daughter likes to keep the colours to a theme – like greens or warm colour etc. But you can also get a stunning effect if you mix all the colours up and create a patchwork with the tissue paper.
Here's the paper we created
We then traced around this squirrel template and cut out a few squirrels.
And here's a squirrel cut from the paper
You could add the squirrels to any background. My daughter choose to add hers to the green tissue paper background that she created earlier.
Luckily we had made a few squirrels as she later decided that she wanted to use one for a birthday card.
Another squirrel cut out for a birthday card
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
