How to do Bleeding Tissue Paper Art with a Big Group

I participated in the Art of Giving last year, remember the giant string art I made with 100+ kids? This year the event was April 2, just 1 month after I gave birth to baby girl, Amelia Jane. I wanted to participate in the Art of Giving again, but I knew I needed a simpler project, something that did not require any prep time. Testing out bleeding tissue paper had been on my to do list for a long time. So I ordered up a package and got to crafting. Y’all, this stuff is awesome and easy and makes really fun art projects for any age kiddo (or adult)! Before I give you the step by step deets of how to make tissue paper art with 100+ kids, here’s the finished art peice that is now hanging in an office building in Austin!

Psst… this post contains affiliate links to the specific products I used.

Here’s what you need to make bleeding tissue paper art

• Bleeding Tissue Paper: (It must say bleeding!) I tried to do this regular tissue paper, and it doesn’t work. That will make you plenty of giant canvases.
• Circle punch: This is not a necessity, you could easily just use scissors, but it makes the shape cutting go much faster.
• Scissors: I used scissors to cut all of other shapes and letters.
• White canvas: I used a 3 ft x 3 ft canvas for this project, but any size will work.
• Plastic cups for water
• Paint bruses
• Clear spray polyurethane
• Bowls to hold the pre cut shapes

Before the event, I cut a ton of shapes out of the bleeding tissue paper. At the event, I allowed older kids to cut out their own shapes and letters too. But, it was certainly nice to have some pre cut for the little guys. What you see below is the test shapes I did before the event. I originally thought I’d try to have the kids do the shapes in row. Big fat, ha! to that idea. The kids had different ideas and I let them go with it! There were shapes on shapes on shapes and I love how it turned out.

Here was our process for the actual making of the art. I say “our” becusae the kids quickly changed my mind as soon as they started creating!

1. Kiddos came up to my table.
2. I handed them a paint brush, a handful of tissue paper shapes, and a water cup.
3. I instructed each child to paint water on the canvas, add shapes, and let dry.
4. Some kiddos used a lot of water and would “watercolor” with the excess dye.
5. Some kids would leave before their shapes dried. For the best color results, wait for the tissue paper to dry completely. When it’s 100% dry the tissue paper will easily flake off.

You can see some watercolor happening in this picture. You can also see how the wet shapes look compared to the bottom row where the tissue paper has already been removed.

Here’s my sweet Max putting his creative genius on our collaborative art peice:

(Photo by Sarah Schiffman)

Remember how I said I was going to have the kids do straight lines, ha!

Here’s a random picture of a small peice of the painting in progress. Pretty cool, right? You can see that some of the tissue paper pieces in this picture have not been pulled off yet and that makes the color more vibrant. Look closely at the green triangle closest to the bottom and you can see how it is peeling up on its own.

I hand cut all of the blue octagons. I actually hand cut everything except for the circles. I tried this same technique using a spray bottle, and I thin that would work fine if you weren’t trying to do it with so many kids. But, I found that the paintbrush gave each kid a lot more control as to wear he or she painted the water and added the shapes.

Here’s one more of the almost finished product. The event was from 12-3, so this entire thing only took me and 100+ kids 3 hours to whip up!

And here is one last picture of our final, framed product!

(Photo by Jim Lincoln)

I’m not 100% sure what sponsor is getting our art peice, but I get to find out at the Giver Gallery! The Art of Giving is such a neat fundraiser for our local Children’s hospital, and this year we raised 190,000 dollars! Oh and here are all 12 collaborative art pieces from last year.