I love it when a kid's art project doubles as a fine motor activity, like this Q-Tip Star Art. Painting with Q-tips is a fun way for kids to experiment with art and strengthen their small hand muscles at the same time.
You can learn How to Dye Q-Tips and practice Q-Tips and Straws Fine Motor Skills for an extension to this activity.
You will need:
- Black construction paper
- White crayon or white colored pencil
- Yellow and white paint
- Small cups for paint
- Star template (at the bottom of this post)
- Scissors
- 2 q-tips
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!
For more kids art projects with q-tips check out:
Heather A
What a fun and simple idea for the kids to enjoy! Pinned and sharing on Facebook this week 🙂