Try printing with cherries for an unusual art tool for kids to experiment with! Printing with cherries creates wonderful dot art or pointillism, and is very effective as a fun and unique art activity to try out.

Printing with Cherries!

We have a cherry tree growing in our garden and often the unripe cherries are picked a little too early by some eager young hands (and others even fall off by themselves due to over-growth.) When this happened recently we kept most to try and ripen them in a bowl in the sunshine, but I selected 5 and decided we could use them for a fun printing experiment!

We added a thin layer of paint to some pudding jars in different colours, and dipped one cherry into each one, with the instruction not to mix them up (not too soon anyway!)

Then they simply held onto the stalks and pushed them firmly onto paper, lifting off to reveal the print!

We had a go at random pattern making, then they chose to make butterflies and spirals which looked so effective!

We talked about pushing down and then lifting straight back up, without letting the cherry slide over the paper, so as to retain the dot shape. Of course, it would also be fun to slide them all over the paper and use them as a drawing implement too.

We chatted about pointillism and how artists in the past had made entire paintings from a series of tiny dots across the canvas. Seurat was very famous for this and his works took an extremely long time to complete! Using these large dots means much quicker art production for us though, phew!

Art activities for kids are often over-complicated and too focused on the outcome, in a craft and results driven market. Art for arts sake is about enjoying the process, while experimenting with tools and media, finding out about colours, shapes, patterns, texture, form and tone.

I love finding odd items from around the house or garden to get creative with and it means the possibilities for art are limitless, if you open your eyes wide to the materials we already have to hand!

So if you don’t happen to have some cherries fallen from a tree in your own garden, perhaps you have half a lemon that’s drying up or a stem of old broccoli. These both make lovely prints, as do bell peppers, okra and celery stalks.

For a non-food alternative, try out cotton reels, string, leaves, flowers, cookie cutters, bead strings and Lego, to name but a few!

We have a large collection of ideas of things to print with in our PRINTING IDEAS archive here!

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Find our ART and CRAFT archives here for loads more ideas for babies to older school age kids.