Frame Worthy Winter Process Art for Toddlers

Winter process art for toddlers is the perfect way to explore creativity during the colder months. Incorporating these hands-on activities into your winter preschool themes encourages self-expression, sensory exploration, and fine motor skill development.

This post is packed with ideas to help toddlers create beautiful winter-themed art projects while enjoying the freedom to explore materials and textures without the pressure of a final product. This is a must add art project to include in your winter preschool lesson plans!

Winter process art for toddlers focuses on the joy of creating rather than achieving a specific end result. These activities allow little ones to explore materials, textures, and colors at their own pace, sparking curiosity and encouraging creativity.

Every year, I include at least one winter process art activity in my winter theme preschool lesson plans. For some reason, I feel like winter offers so much inspiration for process art!

The art activity is a simple painting, but the results are far from basic. Children use an empty gift card to scrape paint across a canvas board that when dried looks like real ice crystals.

The beauty of process art lies in its open-ended nature, so even if every child is using the exact same materials, the results vary widely. This form of art is perfect for engaging toddlers in sensory-rich experiences while tying into your favorite winter preschool themes.

And this winter process art for toddlers is beautiful to boot, too! Just look at that! Like I said…frame worthy!

What is Process Art?

By definition, process art emphasizes the act and process of making art over the product produced. It is open-ended, self-motivated and based on experience and experimenting. Characteristics of process art include:

• no specified outcome
• no step-by-step instructions
• no sample for children to follow
• work is entirely of the children’s own choice

Why is Process Art Important for Toddlers?

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) stands by that process art as highly developmentally appropriate for the preschool classroom. Some benefit of process art includes:

• nurturing social and emotional health
• reinforcing learning skills like focus, relaxation, mindfulness, or emotional sharing
• inspiring creativity, question asking, and problem solving
• builds cognitive skills like comparison, planning, and problem solving
• encourages oral language development

Have older kiddos? Try this winter art project for preschoolers!
It’s a combination of process and craft and makes the perfect gift for loved ones.

Winter Process Art for Toddlers and Preschoolers

There is so much I loved about creating these paintings with my toddler class. Although, my older preschoolers also made these same paintings. That’s right, this is winter process art for preschoolers, too!

In fact, I had a parent ask for instructions on the technique because she wanted to make one herself! (And I may have made a couple of my own, too).

Materials

• 8×10 canvas boards
• washable tempera paint
• empty gift cards 
• liquid glue
• paint brushes
• course iridescent glitter (or Epsom salt if you don’t do glitter)
• snowflake confetti

The Set Up

1. Place a canvas board on a tray for your preschooler or toddler. If your budget doesn’t allow for canvas, then try using foam core boards (found near the poster board), or even cardboard. (But cardboard will create a different texture).
2. Have an empty gift card and some paint ready. Now, invite your kiddos to join you in making some beautiful winter paintings.

Tips to Minimize Mess:

• Mentally prepare for a little chaos – it’s all part of the fun!
• Use art smocks to protect clothing. These are great for art projects and sensory activities like snow floam or water play. They were a necessity in our Slime Avalanche Arctic Animal Activity.
• Provide trays for kids to work on. Food trays are affordable, easy to clean, and even dishwasher safe for convenience.

How to – Gift Card Painting Technique

Start by inviting your preschoolers or toddlers to squeeze some paint into their canvas.

When I let my students do their own squeezing, I always spend a minute teaching them how. I tell them that it doesn’t take a hard squeeze and I also share that they don’t need a giant blog of paint. In this case, I used an extra canvas to show them just the right amount of paint. (Too much paint will take away from the effect of the gift card painting process, and I explain this to the children, too).

Some of my preschoolers chose to make dots of paint, while others chose to make lines of paint. Either approach works, but it’s important to let your preschoolers have control here. (I know it’s scary handing over a bottle of paint for them to squirt themselves).

Now, using an empty gift card, push and pull the paint around the canvas to create the desired effect. It’s ok to leave thick paint on the canvas, and in fact, I personally prefer it. It will help create more visual interest.

The preschoolers discovered that the more the moved the paint, the more the paint mixed together and blended colors. It’s hard not to tell preschoolers when to stop in this process, but just let them push and pull as they please.

You can stop here with just one layer of paint, but we chose to extend this art project out over several school days by adding more paint and repeating the process a couple of times. This created multiple layers of color, which added even more visual interest.

Try our Sparkly Winter Process Art for Preschoolers! These use epsom salts to create a sparkle like real snow.

My classes experimented with using more or less paint each time we added more. They experimented with pulling the gift card hard by adding a lot of pressure, versus being softer and using very little pressure. (A hard pull with scrape more paint and reveal more of the texture of the canvas, whereas a soft pull will create more texture with the paint itself.

Thick layers of paint might crack a little bit as they dry, but I think that just adds to the winter effect of the art. Think of how many times you have seen cracked ice or thick, crackly frost on the windows. It was an unintended effect of using many layers of paint, but a nice surprise, I think.

You can continue this process as many times as you’d like. Each layer you add gives the canvases even more visual interest.

After that, we used paint brushes to slather glue all over the dried canvases. This needs to be very quick. Because we used washable tempera paint, the glue picked up some of the paint and blended the colors some. This will happen with any washable paint.

If you want to completely avoid this, you will definitely want to use acrylic paint, but be aware that acrylic doesn’t wash out of clothing very well, to protect those preschoolers with some art smocks!

Alternatively, you can invite your toddlers to also just squirt paint directly onto the canvas.

These Valentine Heart Collages use a similar painting technique.

Once we had a fair amount of glue on our canvases, we then used the snowflake confetti to very deliberately place snowflakes all around our winter paintings.

This portion took my toddlers the longest, and also seemed to hold their interest the longest, too. They were all very intentional about the placement of their snowflakes. Just one of the many things that makes this a great winter activity and toddler art project!

The children continued to create, each at their own pace.

You can really see the layers of paint in these photos. Multiple layers of wintery colors would have been just fine with all the layers they created, but I love how intricate each piece became the more we added and worked.

Most of my toddler class ended up dropping them one by one onto their winter paintings, making them fall in random places like real snowflakes. I applauded their creativity, and when I asked what sounds real snowflakes made as they fell, my toddler class gave me a range of “whoosing” and “shooshing” noises.

Leave it to a toddler to add a little pretend and creative play to our art project!

Finally, we added just the slightest sprinkle, of course, iridescent glitter. We chose iridescent because I wanted to offer my preschoolers some sparkle without the extra color. Not all of my students chose to add the glitter, either. But the end results were stunning, with and without the extra glitter.

The student who created this wintery art piece ended up laying his gift card in the wet paint, creating the vein-like lines you see.

I love how the heavy layer of paint in this painting made the piece look like a leaf. You can see the multiple layers of color through the “leaf”, just like in real life.

This student painted quite a bit more with her glue, mixing the dried paint colors again and pulling up some of the colors to reveal the mostly purple layer she started with. I love that you can see the brush strokes on the left side of the painting.

My preschoolers made these as Christmas gifts for their parents, and I think you can agree that not only can process art be beautiful but these, in particular, are frame worthy! They will sit on my fireplace mantle until summer, I’m sure!

Snowflake Cookie Cutter Stamping is another winter great process art activity for toddlers!

More Winter Art Ideas for Kids

• Snowball Winter Process Art for Preschoolers
• Birch Winter Tree Art
• Torn Paper Snowflake Collage
• Ice Paintings
• Snow Painting with Water Balloons
• Salt and Watercolor Winter Paintings