Painted Tissue Paper Collage

When I was a teacher the kids and I loved doing Eric Carle inspired pieces, painting large papers with various types of texture creating techniques and then cutting them up into many coloured collages! I have always wanted to extend this to tissue paper and so we gave it a go!

The floral piece is for our son’s teacher at the end of the year to say, “Thank you for helping me grow!” Our daughter’s ice cream cone- “Being in your class has been a real treat!” Personally I love her simple shape collage! (A great way to start!)

Materials

Tissue paper
Acrylic paint
Paint brushes (Or any other materials to make texture)
Scissors
Glue
Acrylic gloss
Canvas boards (you could also use think paper such as cardstock)
We also find a smock and craft tray helpful for every project:

Directions

We went out into nature to get some inspiration for our project, taking photos of some of the neighbourhood blooms.

We then drew sketches of various flowers we saw:

Don your smock and carefully paint your tissue paper using brushes or various items to create the appearance of texture. We went with something simple, but you could extend this however you like!

Allow to dry overnight.

Here are a few examples:

Carefully cut blooms out of your tissue paper, gluing them to your board. One trick we did was to draw out our bloom and then to cut inside the lines to eliminate the pencil marks. Another tip that is also helpful for children is to do a rough cut around your shape to make it easier to manage when cutting the actual shape out in finer detail. The stems are just simple strips.

We allowed this to dry overnight and then gently finished off the projects with a thin layer of acrylic gloss.

Here are our experimentations with other summer-y ideas: cacti, watermelons and ice cream cones!

Purpose

Learning how to create the look of texture with paint
Exploring the technique of collage, compiling various cutouts to create an overall image, which may include the process of layering