Father’s Day Arts & Crafts for the Children: Making Artwork and Photo Art

It is that time of year again, Spring! And with the changing of seasons comes a whole new set of holidays, including the June holiday of Father’s Day. This is the day that kids can show their appreciation for all that dad does for the family. This year, help your kids create a great homemade gift for their day using one of these kids’ crafts ideas.

Kids’ Artwork

One of the easiest ways for kids to create a Father’s Day gift is to draw, paint or color a picture. This project can be freehand, it can be traced, or it can come from a color book. The gift is the process of creating a special piece of art for Dad.

To help inspire your young artists browse through magazines that have photographs of things that dad really enjoys. (G rated of course!) For example, if dad is into motorcycles you can look through motorcycle magazines and books to find inspiration. On the other hand, if dad is wildlife nut, then you can browse through wildlife magazines, books or watch a wildlife documentary. After you have a picture that your kids want to use as their inspiration, provide them with paper and art supplies, and then let them create their masterpiece. After they have completed their artwork, mount it on cardboard and frame it using a pre-cut mat. You can also use a wooden or metal frame to create an extra special piece of art for dad.

Photo Art

Another fun, and cheap, craft project your kids can do to create a Father’s Day present is to create a piece of photo art. Photo art is basically a photo collage that you create when you Photoshop family photographs of the kids onto a new and fun background.

To complete this project you will need Photoshop or some other type of digital photo editing software, family photographs and a collection of great backgrounds. You can find backgrounds online, in the clip art section of your editing software or by scanning in pages from picture books, adventure books or magazine. Finally, you will need photo paper and a color printer.

To start with, you will want to find both a great background and pictures of the kids to work with. To get the best result, try to find family pictures that have a light source that is coming from the same direction as the light source in your background image. To determine the direction of the light source, look at where the shadows in each image are being cast, and then try to match them up.

The next step is to cut and paste your photo collage together. You may need to help your kids with this part if they are really young. However, older kids will probably have no problems outlining, selecting, cutting and refining their pictures. When you have your kids’ pictures cleaned up, your next step is to paste them, or add them, to your background. You will most likely need to resize their photos to make them fit in naturally into the scale of the background. If you have limited editing abilities, keep their images large and place them in the foreground so that their bodies hang off the edge. This will make it seem like they are standing close to the camera and the background will look far away. This is the easiest way to make the pictures look like they belong together.

After you have finished playing around with your images, it is time to create the final product. You have a couple of options. Your first option is to save the image to a CD and give it to dad as a desktop wallpaper for his office computer. Your second option is to print it out and frame it, so that dad can hang it on his wall.