The Eric Carle Tissue Paper Art Project

A few months back I read this great article in Parents magazine which talked about the importance of exposing children to art. The article suggested that it is a good idea to recreate masterpiece paintings of artists with children so that they understand and get influenced by a variety of styles and genres.

Hmmm…sounds like a good project for Ma and Little B!

Though the article suggested paintings by the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Pable Picasso, I wanted to start with something that Little B is already aware of. That lead me to Eric Carle.

Little B has been an Eric Carle fan as long as I can remember (or may be we have been Eric Carle fans and that is what we have tried to impose on her!). Her first book was From Head to Toe, which we bought when she was still a pea inside my pod. This was the first book she was read to at bedtime. In fact, this book has traveled extensively as we took it with us wherever we went.

Over a period of time Little B has round up quite a lot of Eric Carle in her collection. She reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar the same way she did when she was a year old. Poking fingers in the holes, amazed at the amount of food, laughing at caterpillar’s stomach ache and most of all looking at the very bright, lively and charming pictures.

So yes I wanted to recreate Eric Carle with her. If you look at the pictures from his books, you will see that his style is that of lot of colors and textures thrown in. He basically paints papers and then makes collage out of them for his books.

Eric Carle Tissue Paper Art

You Will Need

Tissue papers

Watercolors

Acrylic colors

Brushes

A variety of objects that you can do to give texture to your paper

How to Go About It

Start with a tissue paper sheet. I used the regular boxed tissue papers.

Color the entire paper with one particular color of water color.

The consistency of your water color should not be too thick or too thin. Also, because we are using tissue paper and because a child is supposed to do this project, it is important that the child is made aware of certain things. Like avoiding over-coloring at a single spot or handling tissue paper delicately.

Little B painted 6 tissue papers with 6 different colors. We left them to dry on newspapers. This wan’t a great idea because when dried, a couple of them got stuck to the newspaper itself.

So the best thing would be to leave them to dry on the floor. You would have to give them a good 4-6 hours to completely dry.

Then we would require acrylic colors (I got the ones with pearl finish to give papers a bright look). Also gather whatever variety of objects you can to stamp and scratch on the paper.

Now take one colored tissue paper at a time and give it an extra something. Like these red circles on the black tissue paper.

Just make sure that the color of textures and stamps that your are putting on the paper go well with the base color of the paper.

You can use ANY object and create a pattern on the tissue paper. For

example, Little B used our tea strainer here.

or this coffee stirrer from McDonald’s

 or these foam letters

or fork

 Basically anything!

Once completely dry, you can even add another layer of texture to the tissue papers.

And there you have it – your own stash of Eric Carle papers!

What did I finally do with the paper? Oh I wrapped gifts with it, made it into bookmarks and yes this cool thank you card as well – Whoo Hoo Thank You Handmade Card.