Chalk Pastel Art Projects for Kids: Three Fun Ideas
Below you’ll learn about three easy chalk pastel art projects for kids ideas. Paint a tree, color a face, or draw some very real looking apples!
Paint a Spooky Tree
Material
- Multimedia paper
- Old CD for tracing
- Chalk pastels (blue and purple recommended)
- Tempera cake paint, black
- Paint brush, water
Directions
Time needed: 1 hour
PAINT A SPOOKY TREE
- Trace a CD near the top of a 9″ x 12″ sheet of paper with a pencil.
It will be your full moon.
- Color the background of the moon with blue and purple chalk pastel.
Blend by shading and blending with your fingers. Take care to not make too much chalk dust so the moon stays clean and white.
- Soften the black tempera cake with a generous amount of water, or until the paint is very black.
Start painting the tree with the brush. (Younger students can just paint a straight tree, and older ones can play with the perspective and make it angled.)
- Add thickness to your tree trunk and branches so it looks old.
Paint any other details of the tree that you might think of.
Giant Chalk Pastel Drawings
The large paper lets students draw with more control, so much more than if they had been working on a 9″x 12″ paper. This class had no puddles or unrecognizable glue shapes anywhere.
Are you trying to envision how to stack 35 giant glue drawings in a drawing rack? My answer is simply to not even try. Most racks are always a little slanted, so even if you could get a drawing in there, the glue would run to one side and pretty much ruin the art.
No, the solution is to save this for the end of the day, and just use your flat desks as drying racks. Students can make their large pencil sketches anytime, but save the glue step as the last event of the day, and leave the art to dry overnight.
Materials
- Black construction paper, 18″ x 24″
- White glue
- Chalk pastels
Directions
- Demonstrate how to draw a face that fills up an 18″ x 24″ paper. An oval that was just inches in from all sides is first, then the facial proportions. Eyes are drawn in the middle, the bottom of the nose halfway down, and the mouth centered in the space remaining.
- Students trace all their pencil lines with white glue, and let their portraits dry flat overnight. (Tip: this was done in their homerooms at the end of the day.)
- Using chalk pastels, color in all the different areas and blend them with their fingers. One interesting result of watching students finish was that the scale of the project seemed to engage them more than usual. Perhaps more projects would benefit from just being plain BIG?
Draw Chalk Apples
Chalk pastels can create some amazing color, but they are the hardest thing to try to control. My recommendation is to try to control them as little as possible.
I’ve tried them in dozens of projects, and keep coming back to the fact that they do best with super simple, super large, very uncomplicated shapes. These apples worked out gloriously well, if you ask me, and making them on brightly colored card stock boosted the color and was more forgiving of smudges.
Materials
• Colored paper, I used Recollections cardstock in Navy and Purple*
• Black oil pastel
• Chalk pastels
Directions
1. Draw an apple that FILLS one sheet of paper.
2. Trace it with a black oil pastel.
3. Trace it again to make a very thick line. This will help keep the chalk dust from spreading to the background, or at least minimize it.
4. Take a white chalk pastel and color in a oval or squarish shape near the top left corner to make a highlight. Blend it in so it is smooth and has fuzzy edges.
5. Choose your main apple color and gently fill the apple, coloring around the white highlight. Blend the highlight edges so they are soft and fuzzy and blend into the main color.
6. Gently rub some brown chalk pastel on the right side of the apple. Smooth with your fingers to blend in the color.
More Chalk Pastel Ideas
