Watercolor Bugs With Stencils

My girls just love it when we change up an activity that we do. At our house, we try and use something more than just one way! Today is a twist on something we have done many times.

We have loved the Melissa & Doug Textured Stencils – Insects. They make such pictures. Plus we can always have tons of fun with them.

We love watercolor painting at our house the last little while. It is fun to work with and can dry fast while you are doing your painting. Plus every painting you do can be different and changed up with the activity you are doing.

Watercolor Bugs with Stencils - a fun fine motor painting activity for kids to do - 3Dinosaurs.com

Bugs are a great theme for spring at our house. We are always looking for bugs during spring. We love doing a Bug Hunt. A lot of the bugs that we see at the start of the spring are bees. We are always on the lookout for more of them.

Two books we read with this activity were: Bugs! Bugs! Bugs! and I Like Bugs (Step-Into-Reading, Step 1).

What you need for this activity: paper, watercolors and Melissa & Doug Textured Stencils – Insects. You could also do this with the Sea Life and Dinosaurs.

We used the butterfly and beetle for our painting.

The first thing you do is pick a place where you want your bug. I had a paper big enough that we could put two of the bugs on the paper. She picked where she wanted butterfly first.

She picked a color that she wanted to trace the butterfly. She used a dark purple color. She held with one hand the stencil in place while she painted. It was easy to see the lines on the paper as she made them.

After she finished outlining the butterfly she did the beetle. She loved that it had big circles to fill in.

She let the pictures dry a little bit before she started filling in the colors. This was something fun to see how creative she can be with her color choices and design ideas. I like these open ideas that help them make what they want. This is their art project and I just give them a direction to start with.