It’s no secret that I love painting with my daughters so it seemed fitting to do cotton ball heart painting for Valentine’s! I’m not usually big on celebrating commercial holidays, but something about all of these hearts and happy colors makes me want to spread the love.

This craft is awesome because it’s really inexpensive and makes a unique gift or a cute decor piece. The materials we used can all be found at Dollar Tree and it is 100% impossible to mess up!

Materials

• paint- you can use any colors, but we mixed together red, blue, and white to get the colors we wanted
• paint palette or plate
• 8×10 canvasses or sturdy paper
• cotton balls
• clothespins
• heart stencils (I cut ours out of a cereal box)
• tape

Instructions

1. Put a small piece of tape on the back of the stencil and stick it to the canvas. I let my kiddos choose where and how they wanted to place their hearts.
2. Clip one cotton ball on each clothespin to make your paintbrushes.
3. Pour the paint onto the palette. We mixed all of our colors to make “Valentine’s” colors.
4. Gently dip the cotton balls into the paint and start dabbing the canvas. A little paint goes a long way!
5. When your little ones are finished, let the paint dry completely before taking the stencil off.

I tried not to micromanage the girls so that they would experiment with different colors and movements. I am honestly obsessed with how precious both of their paintings ended up!

The nice thing about this painting technique is that it can be used for literally any theme or occasion. Basically, you can expect to see us try this again with more shapes and sizes!

If you love cotton ball heart painting, you should try our soft homemade playdough or heart crayons made in the microwave.

Talk to you soon!