Easy Chinese New Year art activity

This easy Chinese New Year art activity takes inspiration from the traditional colours of the festival for some sensory, process painting.

Easy Chinese New Year art activity using paint

For a simple, easy Chinese New Year art activity we took inspiration from the colours of the festival to create glittery pictures.

Setting limits in the colours we use for an art activity can encourage us to explore different sensory aspects.

For our Chinese-inspired art we picked a colour palette of just gold and red – traditional colours of the lunar new year festival. We used red card, and glitter glue as our paint, giving us the opportunity to focus on the feel and sparkle of the paint.

This article is part of our Chinese New Year activities for children.

In this activity you can:

:: enjoy an easy Chinese New Year art activity

:: learn about the colours associated with Chinese New Year

:: find links to more Chinese New Year activities and crafts to enjoy with your children

Ready-made Chinese New Year lesson plans, all in one place

The best and easiest way to teach your children about Chinese New Year is with our ready-made Chinese New Year thematic unit. Join our Play Academy and download a ready-made Chinese new Year Unit.

This Unit includes lessons on Chinese New Year and how it is celebrated; the animals of the Chinese zodiac; Chinese dragons and how to make your own dragon puppet; how to make Chinese-style paper lanterns; math and literacy activities including playing lucky 8s, counting to ten in Chinese and play red envelope games; explore sensory painting and taking a mandarin sensory taste test.

In this Chinese New Year Unit you’ll also receive bonus printables including a Red Envelope mat for math activities and three-part colour-in Chinese Zodiac Animals matching cards.

If you are not yet a member of NurtureStore’s Play Academy, join us here to get this and over 50 more ready-made teaching units.

Introducing the easy Chinese New Year art activity

To introduce the activity you might take a look at photographs of Chinese New Year celebrations and talk about the colours and symbols that your children can see in them.

What themes and similarities can they spot? 

You can start a conversation simply by asking “What can you see in the picture?”

You could also talk about other celebrations they are familiar with and see if they associate them with special colours. What colour is Valentines Day? What about Halloween? Or St. Patrick’s Day? Do they know why a festival has particular colours?

What is process art?

With young children, process art is very important. This is where the focus of the art activity is on the doing, not the end product.

Here we are inviting our children to explore the materials on offer, to try them out, and create their own work of art.

We’re not overly concerned how the picture turns out, and everyone can decide elements of the art for themselves.

Encouraging experimentation with process art

Your children might like to use paint brushes or fingers to paint.

They could paint lines, blobs, swirls or swooshes. They can explore how the glitter glue feels. Is it the same as ordinary paint? How is it different?

They might like to add in extra materials to their art work to create a collage. We found gold ribbon and ric rac in our craft supplies and used scissors to snip small pieces onto the wet glitter glue.

Notice too, how the glitter glue changes appearance as it dries.

Turn your art into Chinese lanterns

Once you have finished exploring and experimenting with the paint, colours and textures of this easy Chinese New Year art activity you might like to use your finished art works to make decorations.

Click though to see how to make Chinese lanterns from your red and gold paper.

More Chinese New Year activities for children

See our full index of Chinese New Year activities for more ideas including how to make Chinese Lanterns, math and literacy activities using red envelopes, and sensory play activities for Chinese New Year.