Children’s literature is a great source of inspiration for many of our projects. Check out our latest Art/Lit project below and then see some more book based art ideas at the end of this post.

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Our Mixed Media Rainbow Art inspired by the book, How the Crayons Saved the Rainbow by Monica Sweeney, is a fun way to reuse a variety of materials, such as broken bits of crayons that are destined for the trash bin! See our steps below and the fun processes we used to make this rainbow themed art.

Materials:

• Small pieces of crayons (rainbow colors)
• School glue
• Cardboard
• Tempera sticks
• Art paper
• Tempera
• Credit card or stiff piece of cardboard
• Googly eyes
• Permanent markers (blue and black)
• Pipe cleaners
• Hot glue

Step 1:

We started by soaking our large stash of crayons and crayon bits in a tub of water to loosen the wrappers. Removing the wrappers provided my girls with some entertainment and kept them busy! (FYI soaking the wrappers may take overnight for newer crayons).

Step 2:

Find a sturdy piece of cardboard to use for your background. We painted in some grass and sky with our beloved tempera sticks.

We used these pages from the book for inspiration.

Step 3:

We took our previously soaked crayons and broke them into little pieces to use for our rainbow. We drew a curved line of glue onto our painted cardboard to stick down our red crayons. We continued that process for the other colors of the rainbow.

Step 4:

We created some painted process art papers to use for our sun and cloud by scraping tempera paint together with a credit card. This is a perfect activity for toddlers and little ones learning about color mixing. See the videos below of Willa in action making orange and gray. Super easy and fast!

 

Step 5:

Once our scrape papers were dry, we used them to cut out suns and clouds. We glued them near the top of our cardboard above our rainbows.

Our finishing touches were adding googly eyes, mouths and rain detail with a permanent marker. We added a pipe cleaner with hot glue to the back for easy hanging.

Our finished Mixed Media Rainbows:

They turned out adorable!

Want more Art/Lit ideas? See our Art Inspired by the Book, Where Oliver Fits, Mixed Media Bugs Using Scrap Art Paper. and see what book we used for our Tree Branch Painting.