Kids of all ages will love this photo collage art activity!
We share easy instructions, some inspiring ideas, and lots of tips to help you try this crazy photo collage art for kids. There is also a set of free printable, black and white photos to make it easy to get started with this fun art project!
Whether you’re a parent looking for an easy art activity to keep your kids busy, or a teacher looking for a fun art lesson, or maybe you want to have a go at this photo collage yourself, get ready to unlock the magic of photo collage art!
“Can I cut this??” My three year old asked me holding up one of the school photos from last year!
“No!” I gasped, thankful that he had asked me before he began creating his masterpiece.
Sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest things. While I wouldn’t let Noah cut up his sisters school photo and glue it onto a box, it did give me an idea for creating some photos he could cut and paste with!
Photo Collage Art for Kids
Photo collage art offers a unique opportunity for children to express their creativity while exploring the endless possibilities of mixing and matching images, and including themselves in the art!
This easy collage activity is great for kids of all ages and so much fun! Everyone will love making weird and wonderful pictures with this simple technique, but it’s also a great activity to do as part of an artist study.
There are many artists who work with a similar collage process, but Romare Bearden is my favourite. Older kids may like to have a look at some examples of his collage art for inspiration and learn more about him and his process.
Making a photo collage is a great way to work on fine motor skills, as well as working on art techniques such as exploring and experimenting with colors, patterns, and textures and making decisions about composition, balance, and storytelling. Plus it’s easy and lots of fun!
Supplies for Making a Crazy Photo Collage
You don’t need many supplies for making a photo collage and you probably have most them around the house already!
You’ll need:
- Paper or cardboard for the backing
- scissors
- glue (you can make your own using this paste recipe or use whatever you have)
- photos
- markers, pencils, or paints
- other collage materials (optional)
You can use whatever paper or cardboard you have as the base for your collage. Coloured paper adds some extra interest, but we just used plain printer paper because that’s what we had.
The most important material for your photo collage is the photos!
Try to find as many different photos as you can. Include images of people, animals, buildings, and objects, and it’s extra fun if you can also use photos of your kids!
You could cut photos from magazines, or print them from online sources. You can use coloured or black and white images, whatever you like.
We scanned in some family photos and printed them in black and white to save in and so that we could add colours and details with markers. I also found lots of random images online and also printed them up in black and white so there was lots to choose from.
How to Make a Crazy Photo Collage
Making a crazy photo collage is as simple as choosing some images, cutting them out, and gluing them onto the page! You can add details with markers or pencils if you like.
Older kids might like to plan out their collages and arrange all their images on the page first, before gluing them down, but don’t worry too much about that for preschoolers, just let them cut, paste and create!
This is my favourite kinds of art activity, where the kids are already dreaming up what they will do before I am even done collecting the materials. All I had to do was dump the materials onto the table, and step back and watch them create these crazy photo collages! It wasn’t long before all of them were busy cutting and pasting and laughing… there was a lot of laughing!
At one point I did have to step in and ask whether we needed to make a rule about only using our own photos, or if we could all agree it was just for fun and we would not complain or get upset if our head ended up on some other creature… thankfully everyone agreed that it is was just for fun, and so the laughter continued!
This open-ended project was perfect for everyone, from the three year old to 41 year old (ahem… that’s me!) so it’s a great activity for a group of kids of various ages. We all had a great time cutting, pasting and creating whatever we could dream up.
We made weird animals like a giraffe with two heads and wings, and a guinea pig bear! We made funny people, like penguin Morgan, Noah Horse, and a lion man who seems to be wearing Morgan’s pajamas! We even made some scary beasts like the crazy monster building giant!
Free Printable Images for Photo Collage Art.
All the images we used (apart from the photos of my kids) are public domain images and came from Pixabay. You can search Pixabay images by category and find all kinds of images to use. I converted all the images to black and white to save on printer ink and so that we could add our own colour.
To make it easy for you to have a go at this photo collage art for kids I collected all the images we used and made them into a pdf document of photo collages. So all you need to do is print out a few copies of each page and you’ll have lots of photos to try this fun art activity.
This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. It will fit to print on US ‘letter sized’ paper, just be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options to allow for printer margins.
Click here to download the photo collage pages
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
More Fun Collage Art Ideas!
If your kids love cutting and gluing then they will love these fun collage art ideas, or check out some of our favourite collage art activities below.
Make a colourful, shimmery, shiny foil collage!
This letter collage activity is a fun way to practice letter recognition, or write a ransom note!
This unusual confetti collage activity is lots of fun!
This looks so fun (I would totally want to get in on it too!). It’s a great way to practice cutting and get creative!
This looks great, it’s definitely getting added to the summer bucket list, thanks Kate, everytime I read your blog I go away with another activity to try with my kiddos xx
So much fun! What a great idea :)
This is such a great idea and I love that you’ve given some photos to print out! Yes, glad Noah asked you about the school photo. LOL
Ohhh! How absolutely FUN! I am going to download and do them today :) Good thing, I had nothing planned :)
Love this idea! It reminded me a little of Salvador Dali work.
Tops idea, Kate. x
Great idea. My son would love the cutting part the most!
I did this with my class yesterday and they loved it! They thought it was hilarious – we had giant children looming over castles, trees growing out of people’s heads, lions roaring in people’s ears…! Thank you for providing the images in such an easy format.
Love it! Collage was one of my favorite art projects as a kid!
I love this, my printer is busy already!
Thanks a million for such a simple yet fabulous idea.
Tracey
Mummy to Isabella & Leila