Easy Watercolor Picture Frame Craft for Kids
These watercolour picture frames are easy to make, and combined with a hand drawn portrait or picture they are the perfect kid-made gift that friends and family will love!
.Get crafty with the kids and make this watercolor photo frame craft for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, a birthday present or Christmas! This water colour picture frame craft is easy enough for toddlers to help make, and is a perfect handmade gift for all occasions
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You only need a few, easy to find, supplies to make this easy picture frame craft with your kids!
Even very young kids can be part of making this kid-made gift and it will still turn our gorgeous!
If you are looking for another fun kid-made picture frame, this easy DIY pom pom frame is great for preschoolers and older kids.
Supplies for Making Watercolor Picture Frames.
- unfinished wooden picture frames
- watercolor paints and water
- paint brushes
- A photo or paper and art supples to make a picture to go in the frame.
We used small, unfinished wooden frames, from Ikea, that fit a 10x15cm picture or photo, but you could choose any sized frame, just make sure they are unfinished wood frames.
You can use any watercolour paints you happen to have. We used our washable watercolor palette that we use for everything, but if you are working with very young children who tend to mix all the colours into a muddy brown (which is very much age appropriate and great for exploring and learning about colours, but maybe not so great to give to grandma!) then you might like to try a set of large watercolor paint discs. You can take out some of the discs in the palette and leave only complimentary colours that combine well eg yellow, orange, red and pink, or yellow blue and green.
How to Make a Watercolour Picture Frame.
This is a super quick and easy craft that makes a gorgeous kid-made gift.
Cover your work surface, and grab your supplies and an art smock for your kids, and you are ready to go!
If you are working with older kids have a quick chat about which colours blend and combine well so they can think about their colour choices. For young kids, just offer paint in complimentary colours and let them go for it!
You’ll need quite a bit of water combined with your paint as it will quickly soak into the wood, ‘staining’ it with colour, making it look gorgeous! Let your kids go to town addling lots of colours and letting them all blend together to make a lovely tie dye like effect.
Allow the frames to dry overnight and then add a photo of picture!
What to Put in your Kid-made Picture Frame.
Now that you have a gorgeous watercolour picture frame you need to fill it with some gorgeous art!
You can easily add a photo, or cut down a piece of your children’s art to fit your frame, or let the kids make an extra special masterpiece!
A fun and easy idea is to have your kids draw portraits of your friends and family.
Draw a Family Portrait.
Get together with your kids before they begin drawing and have a look at some family photos. Have a discussion about how the people look and what things make a person look like themselves – what shape is their face? their eyes? is their hair long or short? curly or straight? what is their mouth like?
Now grab some paper cut to the size of your frames and a black fine liner pen (or coloured markers or pencils) and start drawing your portraits.
Make sure you have a few spare pieces of paper, so you can practice and make your portraits just right!
My girls drew picture of their favourite aunts, and my preschooler drew a picture of his uncle, which is a surprisingly good likeness for a three year old!
All framed up this watercolor picture frame craft and these family portraits made extra special presents!
More DIY Gift Ideas
If your family and friends love getting handmade gifts, here are a few more ideas for gifts kids can make!
Make some of these delicious choc cherry cookies as a lovely homemade gift.
Say thank you with one of these kid-made thank you card templates.
Pop a little gift inside one of these handmade, print and fold gift boxes.
And if your kids just loved drawing family portraits and want to draw more, check out our super fun picture frame drawing prompts set – it’s a $1 deal in our shop for a limited time.
What a great idea for a gift … I know my little girl would love doing this :)
And when they are a little bigger you could get the kids to stitch their pictures onto some calico… ;) just thinking ahead for you :P
They look fabulous – would make a wonderful Mother’s Day present for grandmothers!
What a great idea, I’ll have to bookmark this myself for next Christmas :)
All the recipients in my household agree we love the portraits :-) Some of us even use them as our facebook photo…
What a cool idea. Why haven’t I thought of this before. I was looking for some easy to make yet creative crafts and you’re the answer to that.
This is really wonderful! Very inspiring too :) Would love to see some of these sketches on littlesketchers.com! It’s a platform for parents, uncles, aunts, grand parents and of course teachers and anyone who loves to see children draw and paint and is of the opinion that art is an amazing tool!
Thanks!
C