Dazzling Shooting Star Paintings with Chalk Pastels

These shooting star paintings are out of this world! My daughter had a blast creating her painting and I had fun making mine right alongside her. We used chalk pastels, which are super fun and (fair warning!) super messy to create these paintings.

I love how the bright colors of the chalk pastels pop against the black paper. This would be an easy project to do in a classroom, you can use black construction paper and most kids from about grade 1 and up would be able to this without much assistance.

Pastels are so fun for kids to explore! Take a look at my collection of chalk pastel art for more creative ideas kids will love.

To make this project even easier for you I have created a free printable star template as part of my resource library that is available to my email subscribers. You can click here to sign up for my email list and gain access to my free printable resource library that is full of awesome printables.

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Create Your Own Shooting Star Paintings with Chalk Pastels

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Supplies

Free star templates (optional)
Black pastel paper, black scrapbook paper or black construction paper
Chalk pastels
Scissors
Pastel blending stick or q-tips (optional)
Spray fixative (optional)

Instructions

1. Gather your supplies and cut out your star templates. You can use the templates I have made for this project in my printable library or kids can make their own stars and cut those out.

2. Start with making your big shooting star first. Kids can decide where on their paper to place their star, I think it looks nice in the top corner so there is lots of room for the trailing colors.

3. Take the big star template and choose a color for your star, you can choose yellow or white or any color really. Trace around your star template with thick lines, you want the lines to be fairly thick to help with the smudging.

4. Once you are done tracing, using a pastel smudge tool, a q-tip or your fingers (my favorite method!) smudge the pastels outward away from your star. My daughter liked using the smudge tool the best but I love just using my fingers, I think you get better results with just your fingers. This is such a fun technique with really cool results!

We love using this technique, take a look at this fall leaf chalk pastel art for more ideas!

5. When you are done with your big star it’s time to make the colorful trail of stardust. Kids can choose the colors they want and basically draw with their pastels. My daughter kept her colors side by side with not much mixing, I liked to mix mine up a bit and fan the colors out at the bottom. There is no wrong way, I love to see how everyone chooses their own style to make it unique.

Kids can choose to blend their trail of colors a bit using a blending tool or their fingers. For more detail on blending and other pastel techniques, check out this post on 5 essential chalk pastel techniques for beginners.

6. Now it’s time to add in more stars. We played around with adding different sizes and colors, you can even try tracing around your smaller stars with more than one color and blending them together.

When kids are done with their star painting, you can choose to spray their artwork with a fixative to preserve and keep their pastels from smudging. This step should only be done by an adult, preferably outside in a well-ventilated area.

I love how colorful these shooting star paintings turned out, they look so striking against the black paper. We had so much fun creating them, chalk pastels are always a hit with my kids!

We love creating and exploring with different art supplies and techniques. If you are looking for more art projects to try, take a look at our ultimate collection of amazing art projects for kids!