Cherry Blossom Painting with Cotton Balls

Nothing says spring like seeing blooming cherry blossom trees in gorgeous shades of pink! This cherry blossom painting is a wonderful spring art project for kids. Using cotton balls to paint with is so fun for kids of all ages.

Both my 4-year-old and 7-year-old loved using cotton balls to paint, and so did I! The cotton balls give the painting a fluffy texture, perfect for the cotton candy texture of cherry blossom trees. If you are looking for more art projects, check out my collection of fun and creative painting ideas for kids.

We also made a gorgeous blossom spring tree craft that uses easy paper quilling techniques that you can take a look at. 

For this project, I created a branch printable to make this craft even easier for you (and is great for younger kids!). This template is available to my email subscribers as part of my free printable resource library. Sign up to my email list below to gain instant access.

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Create your own Cherry Blossom Painting

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Supplies

• Canvas paper pad
• Acrylic paint
• Paintbrushes
• Paint palette and water container, recycled containers work great for this
• Cotton balls
• Clothespins

Instructions

We used a canvas paper for this project. It was something I saw in our local art store and thought I would give it a try. It’s basically canvas that would normally be stretched onto a wooden frame but it comes in a pad with 10 sheets. I loved it!

It held the paint really well and I think gives the painting a nice texture. My kids really liked using it as well, it’s always fun to find different surfaces to create on.

1. Because this cherry blossom painting is more of a branch than a whole tree, you want to cut your paper in half for a horizontal painting, which I think looks pretty cool!

2. Mix up your paints. If you have a nice sky blue and two shades of pink already, great! If not, you will need to mix your colors. I ended up mixing our blue with some white and the pink with white to make another lighter shade of pink.

Using two shades of pink helps to give the painting depth and interest. And gives the kids more colors to paint with their cotton balls! We used black for the tree branch.

Related: Orange Tree Cotton Ball Painting

3. Paint the entire canvas with blue for the sky. Our paint was mixed with white so you can see some white streaks here and there in the sky which I think looks nice. Using a larger flat brush for the sky works well.

Let the sky dry completely, or if you are wanting to move on quickly, you can use a hair dryer to help speed things up.

4. Draw in a branch with a pencil. Depending on the age of the child, they may need some help to do this. My daughter wanted me to draw her the branch and then she painted it in. Paint the branch with black paint and let it dry.

Related: Field of Tulips Q-tip Painting

5. Now the fun part! Using two shades of pink, one light and one dark, have the kids paint in the cherry blossom flowers with their cotton ball paintbrushes. Start with the darker shade first, then add the lighter pink. T

here is no need to let each color dry in between, kids can paint with both colors at the same time.

Painting with cotton balls was so fun for both of my kids I know that we will be using them again for another project. I just love how fluffy and vibrant the pink cherry blossoms look against the blue sky and black branch.

This cherry blossom painting makes such a wonderful spring craft for kids and looks absolutely gorgeous when done!

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