Matisse Craft for Kids: Cut Paper Suncatchers

One of my favorite ways to learn about famous artists is to do a project in the style of that artist.

Recently, we learned a little bit about Henri Matisse. We looked at many examples of his work, especially the work he did in the final years of his life when he created with paper cut-outs. He called it “painting with scissors.” You can find examples here. We then set out to do a fun Matisse Craft.

This style of work is so much fun to do. We used tissue paper for our cut-outs to create these Matisse Inspired Suncatchers.

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Supplies Needed

Colored tissue paper
Clear Contact Paper
Scissors
Painter’s Tape

Prep your Matisse craft

To prep for the project, cut a piece Contact Paper for each child. Ours were about the size of a legal-sized sheet of paper.

You can do any size of suncatcher you want.

Create your cut paper suncatchers

After we looked some examples of Matisse’s paper cut-outs, we talked about ways we could make our projects similar.

The girls noticed that he used large shapes and a lot of curvy lines, so we got the scissors out and started cutting.

We cut a variety of shapes from all the colors of tissue paper we had. I had purchased one of those multi-colored tissue paper packs from the dollar store. There was such a great variety of bright colors.

Once we had a pile of cut-outs, the girls started getting creative. We used the tissue pieces to create our pictures before sticking them to the Contact Paper. My girls arranged and rearranged until they knew what they wanted to create.

When we were ready to create our suncathers, we took the backing off of the piece of  Contact Paper and used painter’s tape to stick it to the table sticky side up.

We’ve made many, many suncatchers and I’ve found that it’s helpful to tape the Contact Paper to the table. That way it won’t move all over the place. If you use painter’s tape, you can remove it easily from the Contact Paper.

Once we were done, we removed the contact paper and stuck it directly on the window. The Contact Paper won’t leave any sticky residue on the window.

If you do want to preserve your suncatchers, you can stick another piece of Contact Paper directly over the first piece, sticky side to sticky side.

Our Matisse creations

In the picture below, the creation at the top is a crazy, dancing alien.

The one at the bottom is a sad, crying face.

I love how they both turned out! My girls were able to capture the spirit of Matisse in their own style. Perfect!