Looking for a fun and easy Christmas art project for your kids? Take a look at this Jingle Bells Christmas Art project from my mixed media Christmas series. Your kiddos will love it!
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This mixed media project is a great way for kids to create Christmas decor to display at home or to share as a gift. What’s even better is that it gives kids a chance to experiment with pattern and color combinations, painting, cutting, and detail work.
As long as you’re nearby to provide instruction and help when needed, your child will most likely be able to tackle this project without any problems. In fact, my five year-old did most of it alone! I helped with tracing, but that’s all.
Ready for the step-by-step instructions? Here’s how we created our Jingle Bells Christmas Art:
Jingle Bells Christmas Art Instructions
You’ll want to have all of the project supplies on hand before starting. Here are the supplies you’ll need.
- 8 x 10 Canvas panels or stretched canvas
- Acrylic paint (we used red, green, brown, and champagne glitter)
- Scrapbook paper
- Paintbrushes
- Paint pens (we use gold and yellow Painters)
- Mod Podge
- Template (optional)
- Pencil with eraser
- Sharpie
- Paper towel
Once you’ve got the supplies gathered, you can get started with the project.
1. Prep the Project
The first part of this project involves paper selection and preparation. We started by looking through our scrapbook paper and choosing our patterns for the bells.
Keep in mind that you’ll need two coordinating patterns. One will be the primary paper used, but the second one will be used at the bottom of each bell to show the inside of the jingling bells.
Once we chose our scrapbook pages, I drew bells onto our primary pattern and had my daughter cut them out. Next I used the outline of the bells as a guide for drawing the small cutouts for the inside of each bell and had my daughter cut them out. Your kids (or you) can certainly freehand the bells like I did, but you may prefer to use this free template I created instead.
2. Paint the Background
The next step in the project is an easy one. Once our bells were prepared, my daughter chose a red acrylic paint and painted the entire canvas with it.
When her canvas dried, I used a pencil and sketched a branch running from the upper left corner and also drew four or five groupings of pine needles extending from the branch.
My daughter used my light tracings to guide her as she painted the pine needles green, but added several of her own to fill in the empty spots. She finished out this step by using our brown paint to paint over the branch I sketched for her.
3. Apply Bells
My little one scurried off to play for a bit while her pine needles and branch dried. The great thing about kids exploring mixed media is that all of this painting and drying gives them plenty of time to take a break and do something else.
Once our surface dried, she covered it with a layer of Mod Podge and gently placed the two bells over the branches. She also cut and added the Jingle All the Way strips from the template in this step. (We probably should’ve prepared those strips when we cut the bells, but it didn’t work out that way for us.)
4. Add Paint Accents
When the Mod Podge layer dried, my daughter added the finishing touches to the canvas. She started by outlining the bells with a gold paint pen and then outlining the Jingle All the Way strips with a yellow pen.
She also dipped a pencil eraser in paint and used it to stamp dots on the canvas in groups of three. When the dots dried, she added dabs of glitter paint all over the canvas using a scrunched paper towel. If it had been my painting, I wouldn’t have added the glitter paint to the bells or pine needles, but she’s five and loves glitter. What can I say?
In the areas where she added too much of the glitter paint, I used another paper towel to pick up and transfer the excess paint to other parts of the canvas.
When the layer of glitter dried, she drew a bow on top of the bells with a silver paint pen and outlined it with black Sharpie. She also drew the clappers of the bells with gold paint pens and then outlined all of the gold with the black Sharpie.
So, yeah, she outlined her outlines. Your child doesn’t have to repeat those outlines, but mine’s a little da Vinci-like sometimes and rarely feels like her projects are finished.
When those last layers of paint pen and outlines dried, she sealed it all in with one last layer of Mod Podge and we displayed it with our Christmas decor after it dried.
5 Days of Mixed Media Christmas Art
Looking for other Christmas art ideas for your kids to enjoy? Be sure to check out the others in my Mixed Media Christmas Art series:
You’ll also want to check into one of our favorite mixed media e-courses, Winter Wonderland. This Winter Wonderland Mixed Media Workshop is a great fit for older kids, teens, and even adults. It includes plenty of Christmas and winter art projects and covers painting, hand lettering, collage art, chalkboard art, art journaling, and more.
We seriously love these classes and recommend them any chance we get. You can learn more about the workshop by clicking the image above or by checking out my Winter Wonderland review. You’re going to love it!
