painting inspired kids art

While at Craft Weekend I was inspired by a project by Lindsey of The Pleated Poppy. Lindsey’s version is a painting that can be pretty time consuming. When I saw it, I knew my kids would have fun doing something similar. I don’t have much wall space left, so I didn’t want to do paintings – I feel the need to hang those! Instead, we did a similar version on paper with colored pencils.

Lindsey’s tutorial involved measuring and drawing all the lines on the paper. I thought I would try folding the paper instead. AND my fingers paid the price from all that folding. Next, I added the circles for my 5 & 6 year old. You can find complete instructions on Lindsey’s blog.

The older two boys wanted to draw their own circles. The perfectionist in me really wanted to help, but that would rob them of the joy in creating on their own. Embracing imperfection is pretty important – and hard for some of us to learn.

I have two righties, two lefties and one we think is probably a rightie. It has taken me a while to learn that everything goes much more smoothly when leftys and righties sit without bumping elbows!

After we finished, my kids wanted to do it again. I did not want to fold another paper, so I created a printable version. Just in case you want to make one too and don’t want to deal with all that folding and measuring, you can download the one I made below. If you don’t want the dark lines you can reduce the opacity before printing (and save ink!). Also, keep in mind that your printer may not got to the edges. You could just trim that part off with scissors.

Click on the image to download