Contact Paper is Your New Best Friend!

I never thought I’d use contact paper in this way. Now that I do it is one of my go-to projects. It can be tricky to work with it at first but you’ll get the hand of it once you do a couple of projects. You’ll get the hang of swearing at it….

I learned that smaller pieces are easier to work with and that because of static cling they will stick to the wall for long enough to tape the corners down. We’ve done more than these three contact paper projects but these will give you a good idea of how I use it.

These projects also lend themselves to framing! They create amazing artwork that fits nicely in a frame. You’ll see some of the framed pieces below.

Snowmen for Winter

This is by far my favorite and the most satisfying one to create! You bop a cotton ball on the contact paper and just enough sticks. You can do a pretty large area with just one cotton ball. The first time we did any winter scenes I drew on the non-sticky side of the contact paper, while the backing was still on. I created large snowmen with the body and eyes but nothing else.

In these pictures, you’ll see that Barrett has a blank page to create however he wishes and Grayson has one with a body (Gray has also had times with a blank one). They were also given paper cutouts of snowman parts to add.

Once the creation is done I put a second piece of contact paper on it to seal it together. In the second picture, Barrett has a dry erase marker and is adding a face and doodles to his snowman! It’s hard to see it but the third picture is his completed snowman. The marker doesn’t show up well in the picture.

Hearts for February

This project had the steepest learning curve for me. I was giddy with excitement for them to work with it all! I learned the hard way that I had to let go of my expectations and move on. The project was not going to go how I had imagined it.

I precut hearts from tissue paper and some larger hearts from black paper. Before showing it to the boys I had it all prepared and ready to go. The black hearts are mounted on the sticky side of contact paper. The tree was drawn on the non-sticky side with a sharpie.

Grayson liked to ball up his tissue paper hearts and stick them on and Barrett liked to stick his pieces on and then pull them off. After I took a big breath and moved on from my visions of how it was going to go, we had a lot of fun!

The far left framed picture is done with a white sticky plastic material that they painted on. The other three frames have the tissue paper projects.

Sunshine and New Flowers for Spring

These are two projects put together to create one framed piece.

The Sunshine was created by drawing a sun in sharpie on the non-sticky side. If I do something similar to this again I would recommend going over that lines a couple of times to make them more vibrant.

I searched through several magazines and pulled out any picture that had yellow on it. From here I cut out lots and lots of yellow shapes. When it was time to use them I told the boys it was a surprise picture. They were shown to put their pieces yellow side down. The yellow was hiding from us and we were going to get a surprise when it was all covered up. They both loved seeing the yellow suns appear when we turned them over!

In the first picture, you can see Barrett finishing his sun.

The Flowers were leftover from a St. Patrick’s themed contact paper project using only green; green leaves, green stems, and green clover tops. I cut rectangular strips of the contact paper and drew grass on the non-sticky side with a sharpie. We used this as a lesson on flower parts too!

Once the flowers and the suns were done I mounted them in their frames. They were displayed with other contact paper art that featured rainbows, clouds, and rain.