Painting With Feathers

Painting with toddlers can be a bit intimidating, but I am here to tell you it doesn’t have to be. Although it can be quite messy, painting with toddlers really is fun. If you use the right kinds of paint it can be easily cleaned up.We also love finding unique and "out of the box" ways to paint. Feathers are a new thing for Little Miss this season so we pulled them out again and used them as our paintbrush for this fun Feather painting activity.

(This post contains Amazon Affiliate links for your convenience, so that you can find and reference the materials easily and quickly. This just means that my blog receives a tiny compensation if you click on these links- at no extra charge to you.) 

Feather Painting with Toddlers

Supplies & Setup

To make cleanup easy and to not have to worry about where paint will end up, I love to use these Crayola Washable Finger paints with toddlers and preschoolers. They not only are washable and super easy to clean up, but they are vibrant and work great for all types of painting projects. 

To setup this activity, I simply laid out some feathers on a tray and dribbled several different colors of paint on a piece of cardstock and taped it to the tray so it didn't move. 

I had the tray prepared and read for Little Miss to paint. The trays we have are from Walmart many years ago, but you can find a variety of different trays here. I love using these trays to contain messes and they allow us to do arts and crafts all around the house.

In order to keep the paint off her clothes, we use washable art smocks. The ones we have are no longer available, but there are so many adorable versions out there or you can simply put an old adult tshirt over their clothes or simply have them paint without any clothes on and then take a mid day bath.

 

The key to having as stress free of a painting experience as possible with toddlers is to be sure to have everything ready to go beforehand, as well as all the necessary materials you will need to clean up the paint mess. Toddlers are fast little beings so you have to work quickly to keep paint off of everything.

Feather Painting Process

Once at her table, Little Miss immediately started painting. The smile on her face said it all for me. She absolutely LOVED it. After setting the tray up with 6 different feathers, I decided to take all but two off. I figured this would be less wasteful and wouldn’t overwhelm her as much. She switched back and forth between the feathers and worked on spreading out all of the paint drops all over the paper.

She would occasionally put the feathers down and paint with her hands, but that is ok. She was still painting and having a blast. 

 

The feathers provide a very interesting painting tool for her and allow her to explore paint in a new way and she created an adorable picture.

And of course we had to hang up the dried masterpiece and she loves going to the fridge and says “pic” over and over to show off her picture she painted :)