Tissue Paper Collage

I have a child who rarely smiles for the camera and doesn’t seem to appreciate a mom who wants to document everything (she’ll thank me when she’s older, right?). When bribed with something along the lines of cupcakes, I may have some luck, but I usually hear comments like “put your phone down!” and “Mommy, no pictures! Make art with me!” Sooo, when I snapped this picture at the end of a recent art moment, I thought to myself, “hey, we must have hit art project gold here!” In hindsight, I think she was wowed by the idea of camouflage (more on that later), but why not start a blog post with a smiling kid, right?

What you will need:

• White glue and Water
• Small pieces of tissue paper. I cut mine into little irregular rectangles, but any shape will do. Ours is the “bleeding kind” from Discount School Supply, but if you’re scrounging around for materials for a project you’re doing RIGHT NOW!, see if you have any stashed away with your gift wrapping. Basically, you want really thin paper that will easily soak into the glue. My daughter called this “booger paper,” presumably because we use tissues to wipe noses. So funny.
• Paper to use as a substrate
• Thick paintbrush
• Containers to hold glue and tissue papers

Mix a little bit of water with glue to make a paintable paste. Liquid starch will also do the trick.

Mix the glue and water together. I thought our brushes were clean, but it appears that the glue soaked some purple paint out of the bristles. No worries — we happen to like the color purple, and it added a nice splash of color to the paper 🙂

Paint some of the glue mixture on the paper, and then stick pieces of tissue paper on the glue. Encourage layering. The piece in the foreground is where I demonstrated the process, trying to keep it simple and not too prescriptive.

Selecting pieces of tissue — creative and critical thinking at work!

The project evolved into making “teeny weeny pieces of art.”

And then we opened a factory.

Surprisingly, this is what cracked her up. She glued a piece of white tissue to the paper, which of course disappeared. We talked about camouflage, and how we can’t see white paper when it’s glued to another sheet of white paper because they “match.” With Halloween around the corner, I placed an orange tissue paper on top of one of our pumpkins, to show that this phenomena occurs with colors other than white. And then the laughing started. So, in case you were wondering, camouflage is pretty funny in the mind of this 28 month old!