Art With Tape

I went to visit my five year old nephew the other day and he was so excited to show me an art project he made.   He told me it was a tape picture.   My sister’s family has a piece of art hanging on their wall made entirely of little pieces of tape and my nephew was trying out the same technique using electrical tape. This was his final result: My three year old son immediately wanted to make one too, so when we went home, we raided my husband’s tool chest and found red, blue, yellow, green, white, and black electrical tape.   We took out the construction paper and his training scissors and got to work. Originally, we thought we could just tear the tape, but we quickly realized that it makes the tape white on the edges, gets all stretched out, and loses some of its stickiness.   Older children can most likely cut as they go, but we found that it was taking a bit too long and was a pain to keep stopping and starting.  Therefore, we decided to cut several pieces of tape in varying lengths before we got started.   I held the roll of tape, he made the cuts (short, long, or somewhere in between) and we placed them around the edge of our table. Once the tape was prepared, my son selected a piece of construction paper and I reminded him that he could choose any piece of tape and place it anywhere on the paper.   He had a tendency to want to go in order around the table using only one color at a time and liked to stack a lot of the pieces on top of each other. When I asked him why, he reminded me about the pop-up book we read together recently and was trying to make his picture a pop-up too.   Who could argue with that! This is a very easy and fun project that yields lovely results.   No paints, no mess, easy clean up, and a beautiful creation!

Tape is sticky fun!   Here are some more fun projects that use tape:

• Flag Shirt Tutorial
• Collage Art From Magazines
• Story Cube Game for Learning to Read
• 15 fun washi tape ideas!