Surreally Fun Collage for Kids

Have you ever seen a giant bird riding the back of a giant fish — in the sky? What about a cat forest planted just at the outskirts of a field of wild flowers? Today we are creating this surreally fun collage for kids.

Playing with surrealism through collage is a nice minimal-mess art project and a great way to stretch the imagination. To get children ready to participate, you can show them some famous surrealist artists. You can also talk about what they would think about ordinary things if they ended up in strange places. For instance, what if a bird had a pizza for a nest? These are two ordinary things, but when they get out together, it’s surreal!

Surreally Fun Collage for Kids

You might also like this Salvador Dali Art Project: Step-By-Step Watercolor Botanical Collage.

You will need:

Images from magazines, old calendars, etc.

• Glue
• Scissors
• Paper background
• Other media if you like (I colored the white background blue with colored pencil.)

If you have time, take some time to look through the pages of your old magazines and calendars. Searching for the best elements is half the fun! If your time is limited or the child doing this has limited skills, you can cut pictures out ahead of time. There will still be plenty of fun to be had in reviewing all the available pictures.

Cut some favorite images out. (Even if you don’t use the cut out pictures right away, they can always be tucked away for another time.) Once you have chosen all your images, play with the possibilities of where you might want to place things. Try several different configurations.

When you have a rough idea of what you want, you can start gluing your pictures! Start with gluing the background elements. The giant tree is one of the main background pieces. The cats were glued next.

You might have to trim some pieces down to fit your page. Save those bits for this collage or even another mixed media project. I use zipper sandwich bags for storing small papers with big potential.

When you piece is finished, there should be several ordinary bits in extraordinary circumstances. The end result might be funny and it can be fun to talk about your pieces!

I thought this piece was fun, but I added blue colored pencil because I really wanted it to look like the bird and the fish were flying in a sky in the background. There’s so much fun stuff you can do with these collages, and minimal mess is a nice bonus!