Make your kids’ snow day extra fun this year with a chilly nature-based snow art project.  Your kids will have a blast creating an abstract masterpiece that brings the fun of winter indoors.

Melting Snow Winter Process Art Project

Materials:

• collected snow
• white construction paper, or other absorbent paper
• liquid food coloring or liquid water color paints
• hairdryer
• art tray

To complete this project, first place the construction paper in the center of the tray. Next, using different colors of the food coloring or liquid water colors, create a random pattern on your paper. Small drops are fine.

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The motion of squeezing the color bottles and controlling how much comes out at a time, will also help your children hone their fine motor skills. Remember, this is a process and your children are still learning. It’s totally fine if you feel like the drops are too close together, too far apart, or too heavy. It will all work out in the end. I promise.

After creating the pattern, have your kids take a handful of snow and scatter it over the surface of the paper. For the purposes of this project, it doesn’t matter what kind of snow you have. Both powdery, dry snow, and heavy, wet snow will work fine for this project.

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Next, plug in the blow dryer, turn it on, and use it to melt the snow on the paper. Depending on how much snow your kids sprinkled, this part can get very soupy and that is totally okay. During this process the kids can manipulate which way the dye flows and mixes, by tilting the tray in various directions. Make sure you are using a drop cloth or are on a non-staining surface, becasue the colored snow water can leak off of the tray while it’s being tilted.

Related Read: Spray Bottle Nature Art

The kids can also take this opportunity to experiment with the different settings on the hair dryer to see if the snow reacts any differently on the cool setting versus the heat setting, or the low setting the high setting, etc. To make this process art project double as a science experiment, you can have your kids create multiple pictures using a different setting on each one. Then, the kids can compare their observations throughout the process and compare the final paintings for similarities/differences.

Happy learning!