Butterfly rain art

Butterfly rain art is a wonderful process art activity perfect for rainy days; alternatively, you can use a spray bottle of water to get the same reaction. We thought that there was something magical watching the rain fall and change and mix our butterflies’ colours.

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Materials

Colour diffusing paper – Coffee filter paper or kitchen roll is perfect
Washable markers or felt tips
rain or spray bottle or pipettes filled with water

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Why This Butterfly Craft Works So Well

This colorful butterfly craft is easy for toddlers, preschoolers, and older kids. The open-ended process art activity encourages creativity, and the spray bottle makes it wonderfully tactile.

How to make butterfly rain art

There are a few ways to make this butterfly rain art, depending on the age of the children involved. I did it with a four year old and a nine year old and it was lovely to see the different ways they tackled the project and what they got out of it.

This project was included in a fab kit we received from Trunkaroo and we adapted it so include the weather as all we seem to have had lately is rain!

Cut out your butterfly shapes on the paper. For younger children, you can draw the butterfly outline and encourage them to cut it, but it can be challenging as it is more floppy than standard paper.

Then colour in your butterflies. You can use lots of colours and make patterns too. You can look at real butterflies as inspiration. Make sure you have something underneath your butterfly to protect your table.

As we had lots of and lots of rain, we took some of our butterflies outside and left them on our pavement in the rain.

You could also do the same with a water spray, which I did with the four-year-old.

The science of colour

You can talk about the different colours of the rainbow as they colour in (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) or the primary colours for younger children (red, blue and yellow).

Discuss what happens when you mix the colours together, such as red and yellow. What do they think will happen to the colours they have next to each other when the rain hits them?

For older children, you can talk about chromatography (separating mixtures) and this was something that really interested Mini. Chromatography means “colour writing” (from the Greek words chroma and graphe). We talked about what we thought would happen when the rain hit the black-coloured section and it was fascinating to see that is split in top colours. If you want to look at this more then filter paper is great for this and you can use one colour of pen and then add the water to see what happens.

This was such a fun process art activity and great to do with a group of children all different ages. I really loved listening to the older ones explaining diffusion and colour mixing to the younger ones.

I am a huge fan of anything that encourages creativity in kids and I love the whole concept of Trunkaroo. Trunkaroo is a monthly subscription service for kids. With a strong focus on making STEAM (Science, Technology Engineering, Art and Maths) aimed at kids to age eight.

I am well aware that not every house has everything you might need for fun projects and this is where Trunkaroo come in. You get a monthly themed box and everything in it to make two magical and engaging projects. Perfect for family fun with little ones or independent screen free time for slightly older kids.