Symmetry art: Valentine love hearts

Symmetry art is a classic childhood painting activity and it works so well as a Valentine craft. Here’s one of our favourite Valentine ideas, mixing maths and art.

Symmetry art: love hearts

To start you’ll need lots and lots of love hearts. We used white card to make ours. Folding the  card in half makes it easier to cut out your shapes, as you’ll want both halves of the heart to be the same size so the symmetry magic works. The children can of course have a go – the hearts can be any size they like.

Click here to get your Art Spark resources.

I’ll guide you through four weeks of beautiful and fun art projects that you can enjoy with your children. At home or at school, these process art projects will give you an interesting framework of activities that you can weave into your weeks, so your children are engaged, creating and enjoying themselves all through art. See more details of Art Spark here.

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Then your hearts are ready to paint.

We decided to go with traditional valentine colours of red and pink.

Time to start adding the colour – and you need to paint on just one half of the heart. (Folding the heart and hiding one side makes it easier to resist the temptation to paint all over at this stage!) You could use paintbrushes, stamps or fingerprints.

Once you’ve painted one side, fold your heart together and gently press to spread the paint inside.

Carefully peel open your heart and ta -da! A magical symmetrical painting appears.

The hearts are wonderful as a project all by themselves but also look great glued onto cards, strung as garlands or fasten a pin on the back and you can wear your heart on your sleeve.

More creative math activities

If you’re looking for play-based exploration and discovery of math and science concepts, come and take a look at our Fizz, Pop, Bang! Playful Science and Math Activities.

And for more math-meets art resources, join my ART of CIRCLES workshop.