Shiny Tissue Paper Art

This shiny tissue paper art project is adapted from an idea we picked up at the Colorations booth at NAEYC 2018, called Tissue Foil Shine. We made some slight modifications to it to make it work a bit better for our kiddos. In a nutshell, we used tissue paper and aluminum foil to create pictures with a cool, subtle shine.

Gather these materials:

• Cardboard square or rectangle for each child — ours were approximately 13 inches by 7 inches. This is the base for your canvas.
• Aluminum foil big enough to cover your cardboard
• Tape
• Assorted colors of non-bleeding tissue paper precut or torn into pieces
• White school glue diluted with water so it spreads easily with a paintbrush and is a bit drippy. Approximately 2 parts glue to 1 part water.
• Paintbrushes and containers for glue

Cover your cardboard with aluminum foil ahead of time and tape down edges.

Give each child a foil-covered scene and ask them to paint the glue onto the foil to begin. This creates a sticky surface so each piece doesn’t need to be glued separately. Those little fingers WILL get sticky, so it’s important to do this at the beginning and knock it out all at once.

Next, ask each child create a scene with the tissue paper pieces. They can tear pieces if they need to adjust sizes, and they can layer pieces over each other to create new colors and add depth. Be sure they add additional glue underneath layered pieces.

The process of deciding what to make is one of our favorite parts. This is a project best completed with one or two children to an adult, so it creates a great opportunity to really dialogue with the kiddos. Unless you have a pre-established theme in mind (we didn’t), this big shiny blank canvas — that can be turned into literally anything — can be a bit overwhelming for your kiddos.

So, to inspire their creativity, we started some meaningful discussions about our favorite things about spring, like playing outside and going hiking (we learned one of our students and her family are very into hiking as a result of this project!). We also talked about all of the beautiful flowers, trees, plants, bugs and other things we see in spring gardens.

This inspired some amazing bursts of creativity and the ideas naturally flowed onto the scenes.

Flat pieces of tissue layer best over others, but balled up pieces give a 3-D effect.

When the scene is complete, have children add another coating of diluted glue over the entire piece. This last step is key, we found, to not just hold the tissue paper on, but to seal down some of the pesky edges and to make the tissue opaque so the foil shines through. The diluted glue also adds a little gloss to the whole piece.

Then set these beauties aside to fully dry. When dry, the whole project takes on a subtle shine. It’s hard to tell from the photos, but it’s a really cool effect. The ripples of the foil and the tissue are frozen in place, which creates texture.

The photos truly do not do these works of art justice. When dry, the tissue paper looks almost painted on the foil. If you look closely below you can see that the light green tissue has a little glitter fleck to it, which produced an interesting sparkle effect.

We loved how these turned out so we mounted the finished products on heavy black tagboard to create a frame.

This is one of the finished masterpieces. Have you tried this project? Let us know how it turned out in the comments section!