Abstract Art for Kids: Easy Flower Shapes Collage

Welcome spring with this pretty craft that gives your child the opportunity to explore using simple shapes and colours to represent a familiar scene. Plus, it sneaks in some fine motor practice!

For this spring flowers craft you will need:

• patterned paper in cheerful, spring colours. I used a variety of scrapbooking paper that I've been holding onto since forever. Old greeting cards would work well too.
• one piece of blue cardstock, poster board or construction paper
• an assortment of circular items (we used a bottle cap, a mason-jar lid and a Play-doh tub lid)
• a pencil
• scissors
• a glue stick

Before we started, my preschooler and I talked a bit about how art doesn't (and shouldn't) always look exactly like real life. I explained that we were going to make flowers using just circles and rectangles. Even though our flowers wouldn't look entirely realistic, the shapes and the colours would suggest what we might see in a spring garden.

My little guy is working his way out of a perfectionist stage, where he wasn't keen on arts and crafts because he felt that what he created didn't look the way it was supposed to. I've been making a concerted effort to show him that art doesn't have to look just one way and that everyone puts their own spin on things. That, along with a continued focus on the process of creating, versus the finished product, have helped him find his way back to enjoying craft time.

Back to our spring flowers!

Begin by using your circular items to trace circles of different sizes on the patterned paper. These will be your flowers (or blossoms). My son had a bit of trouble tracing around the circles so I ended up helping him out. He was more than happy to take over again with his scissors though!

Next, cut out rectangular pieces of green paper for the stems.

Glue the circles and rectangles to the blue paper and add a sun and clouds to finish the scene. 

We may still have snow outside but at least we can enjoy a garden of spring flowers inside!