MATERIALS :
• snowflake stickers
• blue , violet and white tempera paint
• roller and brushes
• big sheet of paper or canvas
DIRECTIONS :
First , I asked my son to stick snowflakes to a sheet . He likes using stickers and it is always good fine motor practice for little fingers ! We used a set of paper snowflakes and a set of silicone ones . The silicone ones did not hold up to his expressive brush work later , so I recommend getting paper or foam-rubber stickers to block out the parts of paper that are not to be painted .
We had paint , brushes and rollers ready to use . My son has grown fond of rollers , having seen me paint furniture around the house , so I have been including them in his artistic experiments . The results have been interesting , too – evenly textured surfaces and fully covered sheets of paper . He started working on this project with a brush , but then switched to a roller , then went back in to add more texture with a brush . It is especially noticeable on the finished piece : the swirls in the middle were painted with the brush and the corners were flattened with the roller .
After my son covered the sheet with a couple of layers of paint and had his hands satisfactorily coated as well , we cleaned up and left the paint to dry . After a couple of hours , the paint was dry enough that we could peel the stickers off . The snowflakes preserved the white underneath !
While toddlers soon learn to paint representative objects , creating abstract art is still an important and fun exercise for young artists . The finished artworks make fun gifts for loving relatives , or to inspire pride in your toddler when displayed on the walls .