My son and I are celebrating the coming spring by making cherry blossom splatter art. Try it yourself – with our printable prompt!

Paint blooming cherry trees, using the free printable art prompt as a starting point to experiment with the fun process art technique of splattering paint. Fun spring craft for kids!

Of all the amazing sights in the spring, cherry blossoms are my favourite. Alas, after moving several times in the last few years, we’re still without a tree of our own. So when spring comes, I stalk around the neighborhood, looking for trees and then waiting for them to turn pink. My annual cherry tree search will start soon. In the meantime, I decided to make a tree.

Of course, it’d be unthinkable to do so without my son who has in the last year firmly established himself as my artist buddy  So I decided to try a particular technique and do cherry blossom splatter art. I was excited about the cherry blossom part, and he was quite enchanted with the splatter part. It’s quite easy – and vibrant – and fun.

Make Cherry Tree Art

You’ll need:

  • liquid watercolours or watercolours in pans (we used both)
  • white gouache/tempera
  • watercolour paper
  • droppers
  • brushes

Start by making a tree or printing our tree prompt. The free printable prompt provides an invitation to create and helps focus on the particular technique, but if you have time and desire, draw the silhouette of a tree first using waterproof ink. Whether you start by printing or for drawing, use watercolour paper for this project.

Next, prepare the paint. We used all the shades of red we could find. We poured liquid watercolour into pans and mixed our dry watercolour with water. It’s important that all the paints be quite runny for splattering.

Splatter Paint

Splattering paint is expressive, messy and wonderful. But do put a splat mat on your table!

You can do it completely randomly and achieve great results. My four-year-old son is quite a pro at that – I have a suspicion all children are. You can also experiment with deliberate splattering, by holding brushes at certain areas or at a certain distance from the paper. Droppers are also excellent tools for splattering paint. Holding a dropper close to paper produces neat round drops; holding it further away makes the drops big and ragged. My son stood on a chair and let the drops fall from his height. He called it “rain art”.

For creating myriads of tiny drops, try flicking a brush against something else – like another brush or a pencil. The drops will fly everywhere.

After putting down a layer of red paint, you can let it dry, then dilute white paint in water and do some more splattering.

Download the Tree Art Prompt!

Paint blooming cherry trees, using the free printable art prompt as a starting point to experiment with the fun process art technique of splattering paint. Fun spring craft for kids!

I love blooming cherry trees! If I could travel anywhere in the world right now, I’d choose Japan, where the tradition of watching blooming trees is borderline art.

More Art Prompts?

We used the same materials, but a different technique for painting rain.

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 Paint blooming cherry trees, using the free printable art prompt as a starting point to experiment with the fun process art technique of splattering paint. Fun spring craft for kids!