Art Activities For Kids: Painting on wood slices with watercolors

Simple art project for kids where the children use watercolors to paint wood slices. Display the finished slices or use them as props for pretend play.

Materials {affiliate links}

Wood Slices
Watercolors
Paint Brushes
Pencils

I set out the wood slices we purchased from our local craft store but the above links has a very similar product available online. At least a 3 inch diameter wood slice makes for a wonderful canvas for younger kids.

If you look at the picture below you will see concentric circles on the wood slices {which is a separate post by itself that has to be written at some point} The children attempted to use compasses to measure and draw their circles.

Once the circles were drawn it was painting time. We usually use our favorite brand of Liquid Watercolor Paints and just enjoy exploring the vibrancy of the paints. All our liquid watercolors art projects and all our play based activities using liquid watercolors are here to show our love/obsession. However this time the younger child preferred to use water color cakes and that’s what we did. Using Acrylic Paint would have been great too but I wanted something that is light, airy and easily blend able. Of course our trusty watercolor paints fit the bill.

My older child was really into the whole green-blue palette since her plan since the beginning of this project was to create earth theme and a possible sunset theme. She has been that way ever since she was a young toddler doing activities. She has a plan and always does. It is actually challenge to have her engage in art projects without any design in mind. I just let her be!

This little one on the other hand loves to use ALL the colors from the palette and just loves to fill the canvas in.

As I mentioned before those lines on the wood slices are part of a math activity we did prior to painting the wood slices. We noticed that the wood needed at at least 3-4 coats of the water color paints and just like any watercolors art projects I had to remind my 5 year old to keep wetting her brush to load more paint.

I love the way this art project turned out and we were so glad we went with water colors. The lightness of the paint gave the finished wood slices such a pleasant effect. This one below started out as a sunset theme as planned by my older one and then turned into a beautiful almost rainbow theme. She preferred to paint along the natural rings present in the wood slices and that made it more attractive to her eyes.

Once the bigger slices were done, they had a ball painting the smaller slices. Not many details went on these ones and they just wanted to paint these as accessories to their primary slices { the earth theme, color wheel and sunset theme} The color wheel wood slice pictured below blended beautifully as it dried. You can see that the smaller wood slices were part of a larger pretend play session they already had going. So they are painting party favors for their “earth cakes”.

We stacked up all our colored wood pieces and at this point the kids had already decided on the next step in this fun activity. They planned on using these gorgeous wood cookies as props for their pretend play session.

I’m so glad that the girls are stepping back and thinking about the colors they choose. Usually my older one has a color wheel next to her and starts planning colors based on what are analogous and opposite colors. They already have favorite combos { pink- purple, green-blue, yellow-pink and green-orange}

The paint on the slices dried pretty quickly and a really long pretend play session involving stacking and story telling ensued.

So many cakes were built.

The play went inside with the addition of Shopkins. I love the paper props they created.

In all, this simple water color art project turned into so much more for us.

Thanks for reading

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