Kids Artwork Ideas (that will look good on your walls!)

We dabbled with lots of kids artwork ideas during the lockdown and it was fun, but we felt we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We were creating a lot of artwork, but knew it was destined for a dusty box in the loft eventually (sorry kids, but…).

Then it dawned on us that we could have fun with the kids and create great artwork for the home. No more relegating the kid’s artwork to the fridge door!

When we started looking at what was possible, a whole world of DIY artwork opened up to us and the vast majority of it could be done with kids!

Here, we’ve tried to break them down into a few main categories of artwork with some great examples and links to tutorials. As we get stuck into some of these ideas ourselves we will put our own tutorials up.

Hope these kids artwork ideas inspire your and your kid’s creativity!

Acrylic Pour Painting

Let’s start with something really quite simple that gives stunning results. The painting above is from Abbotts at Home.

The technique is so easy that this is definitely something the kids can get involved with (with a little supervision!).

The steps are:

Prepare a work area with a plastic sheet that is larger than the canvas, a sheet of plywood, card, whatever you want to paint on.
Prepare your acrylic paints, perhaps you might want to mix specific colours for the right look. Add a little water to help with pouring.
Pour the paints onto the canvas randomly.
Get a hairdryer and blow the paint around to create beautiful shapes and patterns and mix the paints.

For a little more advanced inspiration, check Emma Lindstrom’s fabulous cosmic art!

DIY Silhoutte Wall Art

Another great way to get the kids involved in creating some personalised artwork for the home. This DIY silhouette wall art tutorial from Curbly is so simple and gets great results.

These kinds of silhouette portraits were all the rage in the Georgian era and have slowly been making a comeback (especially at Disneyland for some reason!). You can create your own Georgian family silhouettes for your living room very easily.

Here are the steps:

Tape a large piece of craft paper to a wall and project a silhouette of your subject onto it using a lamp.
Trace around the shape of the head and shoulders.
Cut out the silhouette and trace again onto black paper.
Stick this black paper silhouette onto a white background and place into a frame.

So simple! You can decide if you want to get the kids to cut out the shape (tip: get them to do it if they want and then do your own version later!)

We sound really cruel to our kids! I promise we’re not!!

DIY String Art

You will find so many great string art ideas if you search on Pinterest and the idea behind it is really quite simple. You may need to do the setup yourself if you’re hoping to involve the kids, but this is still a great one for older kids.

This tutorial from Love Our Real Life is all you need to get going. That and some inspiration for what image you want to use! We love the succulent/cactus inspired string art above!

Notice how you can use different coloured strings to bring your string art to life!

The steps are:

You need a sheet of plywood/MDF (which can be painted) or scraps of wood joined together as a background. You also need your choice of image (just an outline will do).
Tape the image to the wood and hammer in nails evenly spaced around the edge of the image.
Remove the image paper and tie a piece of string to one nail. Then start looping the string around nails and across the image in whatever pattern you like.

Moving on from kids artwork ideas, you can obviously take it to another level with more intricate and creative designs, such as this skyline from String Art By Charlotte on Etsy.

Paint By Numbers

Did you ever do a paint by numbers painting as a child? I certainly did and although I think I’m a decent artist (I’m such an optimist!), it was sometimes nice to have the formulaic approach of paint by numbers!

I know this is about kids artwork ideas but now paint by numbers is a bit of an adult trend too! You can have a paint by numbers session together!

There are loads of great paint by number kits specifically targeted at adults, such as the beautiful peacock above, from Victorias Moon.

It’s a bit like the trend for adult colouring-in books!

No need for a tutorial or step by step run down for this one, but there is a way to DIY your own paint by number kit. At PBNify you can upload an image, choose some key colours from it and they will generate a paint by numbers outline and palette for you. All you need to do is try and mix some paint to match the palette, but it doesn’t have to be perfect!

Diamond Painting Kits

So, this is the latest, latest craze (as opposed to the latest craze of adult paint by numbers!). Diamond painting is taking the world by storm. Or at least a strong breeze.

It’s a bit like painting by numbers mixed with embroidery, but you use diamantes instead. You need to have quite a large painting to get some good detail, but they can be quite realistic, as shown in the starry night painting above from DIY Happy Store Crafts on Etsy.

This can also be done in DIY fashion. Because it is very similar to embroidery, you can use an online embroidery pattern maker such as Pixel-Stitch to create your pattern. You might need to play around with it to get exactly the right size pixels for the diamantes.

Then you just need to find the colours of diamantes from the palette that is produced for you from somewhere like Delphine Blue on Etsy.

Paint Sample Card Collage Art

This ain’t going to be your average kids collage art project, this is going to get fancy!

Check out the above fruit collage art from *Tadaam! This may be one for older kids, but you could try out the younger ones with it and see how they get on.

If you have a stencil cutter you could create some art based on a shape theme, like the mobile in this tutorial from Kollabra.

Now, we don’t suggest going and picking up loads of paint sample cards just for this purpose of course, save the environment and all that, but if you’re missing a colour or two…

Brush Stroke Abstract Art

This is a rather broad category because I really couldn’t think of any better way to cover so many different ways of creating abstract art.

The above example is from Style Curator and uses black paint, brushed through hessian cloth, to create an awesome abstract piece that could happily go in any interior designers living room!

I don’t want to be that peronson who suggests that some modern art could have been done by kids but….

You could do something as simple as just brushing a large, decorators paint brush directly onto a canvas, paper, painted sheet timber, whatever you prefer. Try recreating something like this gorgeous print from Mahalo Studio on Etsy (of course, we’re not suggesting you copy it, just use it for inspiration).

Why not get all Jackson Pollack and dribble/splash paint all over it.

I love the idea that anything can be art if you put a frame around it, and sometimes you don’t even need a frame!

Oh my goodness, we’ve only just touched the surface of this subject. There are so many kids artwork ideas we would want to explore, and most likely will.

Things like painted rocks, geometric art, spinning drill art, flower pounding (yes, all of these do exist!).

In the mean time, I hope you’ve found inspiration here to both decorate your home with fantastic art and have fun (with or without the kids) doing it in the process.

Money can’t buy that feeling when someone walks into your home and says “Oh that’s a beautiful piece of artwork, where did you get it?”.

Well, funny you ask… my kids made it! 😲