Construction Vehicle Painting Art

Over the years, we’ve been hard-pressed to find a preschool boy who didn’t have an innate attraction to construction vehicles. There’s something about those big yellow and black vehicles belching all their noise and covered in their copious amounts of dirt.

Now, for as much as we try to redirect from those gender stereotypes in our class, this year we’ve found our class of pre-k Preschooligans tend to gravitate on their own towards widely accepted gender-typical things — our girls are pink-loving, princess-headband-wearing glitter aficionados, and our boys are rough-and-tumble, pew-pew-pewing Power Rangers lovers. The girls have zero, ZERO time for construction truck playsets or digging around with them in the sandbox.

So, now we’ve said all of that, we’re going to contradict it completely. Given that information, you’d think today’s art project would be popular with only the boys in this year’s class. But no, in actuality, this project also captivates the girls, who just love to set aside their inner sparkly unicorns and get their mess on with construction trucks and paint.

This is our long-winded way of telling you that this art project is quite possibly one of the kiddos’ all-time favorites — boy or girl, they all love it. And we couldn’t be happier to see that happen.

The big attraction with this process-based art is the “sanctioned misbehavior” (we seem to do a lot of that around here) of driving toy cars through paint. It’s funny to watch the looks on the kiddos’ faces as they start, they inch the trucks towards the paint and look at you as if to say, “You sure about this? You sure I’m allowed to do this?”

This project requires minimal set up, minimal supplies and minimal prep work, so it checks all of the right boxes for twos, threes or even pre-K kiddos.

Before you start, gather:

• white construction paper
• brown paint
• an assortment of small construction vehicles in various sizes and styles, and with different treads that you or your child/children are comfortable with getting dirty.
• newspaper, wax paper and/or tray (or your preferred mess containment system)
• containers to set dirty vehicles in after use

We like to put down a wax paper sheet on a plastic tray to kind of help keep the mess contained. We use food service bins to hold the wet trucks when not in use.

Start with a glob of paint and a truck, and let her rip!

As you can see, these construction vehicles have been used to paint this way before. Many times before. It’s a good idea to designate some vehicles as paint vehicles only — while you’ll clean them afterwards, they can get discolored or get paint or water stuck in crevices. And we don’t want upset preschoolers if the paint discolors their favorite trucks, do we?

Pushing that paint around like a real, live bulldozer. (beep! beep!) We invariably end up making sound effects, which makes the experience more interactive. And the sound effects would make it more inviting for reluctant artists — although to be honest, we’ve never had a reluctant artist for this particular project. We just like making construction truck sounds.

The bulldozer was a hit because it held some of the paint on the blade and spread it around the paper better than just on the treads. That was an unexpected bonus.

You can see the cool tread marks emerging. With this vehicle, the treads with the blade up look different than when the blade is down. That was a point of fascination for our kiddos.

Oh boy, blades up!

This one reminded me so much of the vehicles in Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site, (click link to purchase book from Amazon) which we read as part of our construction-related units, so we had to include it in this project. The treads were bigger and chunkier than the bulldozer treads, so they thought that was pretty cool.

And here comes the foreman in his “4-wheel drive work truck,” according to one of our kiddos. This vehicle had a finer, tighter tread pattern, so it added another dimension to the “dirt.”

The completed masterpiece! We wash our paint vehicles in our industrial sink with dish soap and water, shake them dry, and then let them air dry the rest of the way.

This project is part of our Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site lesson plan. Check out more of our fun construction-related activities!

Let us know your thoughts on this project and show us your “dirt” masterpieces!