If you like process art and new painting techniques, try this monster straw painting art! The adorable watercolour monsters are guaranteed to brighten your day.

Do all kids have a fondness for straws? In five years, they haven’t lost appeal for my son! That’s why when I saw blowing art projects, I knew we had to try it! The technique is perfect for creating shaggy and fuzzy texture, so we decided to make some shaggy, fuzzy and very friendly monsters!

If you like to paint with watercolours, you can also try:

• rain silhouette art prompt
• painting cosmos with watercolour

Watercolour Monster Blowing Art Materials

The post contains affiliate links to the products we used.

• liquid watercolours (if you don’t have any on hand, you can dilute any water-based paint with water)
• watercolour paper (when painting involves a lot of water, it’s always good to use a special watercolour paper or at least cardstock)
• circle stickers (they’re sold at dollar stores for making garage sale price tags)
• straws & pipettes

Watch a Blowing Art Video

How to Do Straw Painting Art

1 — We began by gluing a few stickers in the middle of the sheet. They would provide a resist and make for an opportunity to draw eyes later. At first, we stuck two stickers for eyes, but fortunately, we soon remembered that monsters seldom come with a conventional number of body parts and made one- and three-eyed creatures.

2 — Put a few drops of paint around the eyes. A pipette adds fun factor to our art endeavours, but you can always use a brush – just don’t rub the paint in.

3 — Blow! It’s fun to experiment with different straws, cutting them down or using wider and narrower ones, as well as varying the intensity of blowing. We liked the idea of Tinkerlab to put the art project in a tray, so that the paint wouldn’t blow all over the table. Unfortunately, we haven’t thought of it until later. We used a sheet of paper underneath, and it got coloured.

Here is one sunny monster!

And here is my son, already working on the next one.

4 — I’d say that the fascination of this technique lies in the unpredictability of the results, but once you’ve done a couple of paintings and seen how it worked, you can try for some specific effects. Have you read Howl’s Moving Castle? It’s a great book for tweens and teens, especially girls, since it features a great female protagonist. Here, I attempted to make one of its characters – the charming fire demon Calcifer – by creating a gradient!

5 — Let the paint completely dry. Depending on how much water you used, it can take 1-2 hours. Once the paint is dry, take the stickers off.

6 — Now, complete the monsters with horns, teeth, claws and whatever other details monsters should have! Use any of your favourite markers. Don’t forget to make a smile, because they’re friendly monsters. ;-)

7 — And if your kids want to play with their monsters, you can cut them out and make puppets of them! My son doesn’t care for puppet sticks. He just manipulates his drawings and paintings and makes stories about them.

More Creative Projects

Use the printable templates and make cute unicorn paper dolls!

Do your children enjoy building with Magna-Tiles? Make Magna-Tile monsters and find more ideas here!

Thanks for reading!

When you make watercolour monster straw painting art, we’ll be delighted to see your results! Tag us on facebook or instagram (@adventureinabox).