Monster Blow Painting
Make a cute, funny, or scary monster blow painting! This fun and easy process art activity is great for Halloween or any time of year, and kids of all ages will love giving it a try.
We first had a go at blow painting a long time ago, when my girls were still small, my big boy just a baby, and the baby not even born yet!
When my kids were little, art was all about the process and not so much about the product, and blow painting was all about learning to blow not suck, and moving the paint around on the paper.
Now that they are getting older, they all love using art to represent ideas and create things. So adding one extra item to this blow painting activity, and suggesting that the blown paint looked like crazy hair, was all the prompt my kids needed to make crazy blow painting monsters!
Here’s another easy and magical process art idea.
How to Make Blow Painting Monsters.
If you’d like to make some crazy monster blow painting you’ll need the following:
- Watered down paint, food colouring or liquid water colours
- A container for each colour of paint
- A spoon for each colour of paint
- Large sheets of paper
- Straws – one for each child
- Permanent markers
We used washable kids liquid tempera paints, similar to these (affiliate link) and we added quite a bit of water to make the paint runny enough so it would flow well across the paper.
If your watered down paint is not as vibrant as you’d like you can try adding a few tops of liquid water colours or food colouring to add some extra oompf!
We used fine tipped, black, permanent markers to draw with, but sharpies (or similar) also work well, especially if you are working with younger children.
Start by drawing a few monster features (or other creatures, or even people) in the middle of the page with permanent markers.
You need to use permanent markers as water based markers will run when the paint is added, so show to the kids how to use them carefully and cover your work surface well. If you are working with little ones, keep an eye on the lids and make sure they go back on once the drawing is done.
As you draw, make sure to leave enough room around your drawing for the monsters hair. We found putting a drawing right in the middle of the paper gave us lots of room for the paint.
Then spoon a few drops of paint wherever you want the monster’s hair to be.
You don’t need a lot of paint, so start out with just a little dollop of each of the colours you’ve chosen, you can always add more later if you want to.
Now you need to start blowing!
You’ll need to hold the straw close to the blob of paint, but not close enough to touch it, then there won’t be any problems if little ones accidentally suck in as well as blow out! Point the straw in the direction you want the paint to move and blow!
As you blow the paint will swirl and mix and run off in all directions making fabulous crazy patterns that look just like monsters hair!
If you are blowing hard without seeing the paint move much, just add a little more water to your paint mixture and have another try.
Keep blowing, and adding more paint, and turning the page to blow in a different direction. And then add some more paint, and blow and blow some more!
Eventually you’ll end up with some crazy looking blow paint monsters!
You’ll need lots of space to dry all your monsters, if your kids are like mine, they will make lots of them!
Are your kids all about the process of making art, or are they getting older and more interested in creating something?
If your kids love making these fun monster blow paintings, they might also like these monster activities:
If you are looking for even more fun Halloween activities, check out our Halloween play dough mats!
There are six different play dough mats in this set, ready to print and play.
You can check out the Halloween play dough mat set over in my shop.
This is such an awesome activity. I can imagine my little girl wanting to do pages and pages of monsters. Now that she is getting older she is actually showing signs of wanting to create more identifiable images. Love this Kate.
I love this activity Katie. It looks like so much fun. I think we are going to definitely give this a try. Thanks for the inspiration!
What a great new spin on blow painting! Sharing :)
thank you!
Love blow paint and paint-fold art. Thank you for making it more interesting by creating a predrawn pictures.
Oh yes we love folded paper art too… we call it squish painting!
This is really awesome. I know for a fact that my son would looove it. Thanks.
HAhaha, amazing! Totally doing this with my students :D
Thanks for sharing!
What a fun idea! I love art ideas that are fresh and easy :) Thanks for the post.
Do you think this activity could be done by a toddler/preschool class?
I’ve done it with a class of 3-5 year olds… but you need to have some practice with the straws first to make sure everyone knows how to blow not suck!
I’d also start with just plain old blow painting – leave out the monster faces to start with and let the kids explore how the paint moves and how they can control then. Then you can draw monster features on afterwards or see if older kids want to draw a face first.
Thanks for sharing this idea… its unique, and gives kids a feeling of power creating their own monsters and directing its shape, color, etc versus being scared by monsters in their dreams