Kids Art Project: Q-Tip Star Art

Last week my daughter came home with an adorable craft from school. It was a candy corn that was painted on black construction paper using a q-tip. I loved how it turned out and tried to think of a kids art project we could make that used the same technique. Since I loved how the colors popped off the black paper, I decided to use black paper again and use white and yellow tempera paint to make stars. So I brought out my HUGE bag of q-tips that I found at the dollar store. Seriously, it is like the never ending bag of q-tips. Needless to say, we use them quite a lot around here. You can learn How to Dye Q-Tips and use Q-Tips and Straws for fine motor practice or use them to make this star art I am sharing today.

Once you print out our free star template, cut out the stars and trace them onto black construction paper. The easiest way to do this is with a white crayon or white colored pencil. Trace as many as you'd like. I've included a few different sizes. My kids would have had a hard time with this step, so I did it myself.

Add a few squirts of white and yellow paint to small cups. Give your child the paper with the stars, the paint cups and provide a q-tip for each cup. I demonstrated how my kids could use the q-tip to create dot painted stars. Your child might just use the q-tip as a paint brush and not paint dots. That's fine too. It's about process over product.

My four year old started by dotting the outline of the star with her painted q-tip.

Once the outline had been painted, my daughter filled in the rest using dots of paint.

Dot painting with a q-tip requires a level of fine motor control. I was surprised to see my daughter holding her q-tip in a different manner than she grips her pencil, but holding it this way gave her more control over her painting.

This kids art project would be a great addition to a space study or unit. My kids just had fun painting in a new way!