Fish Collage with Warm and Cool Colors. Easy Kids Art Idea!

This is a wonderfully easy collage art activity to do and it produces great results! One of the reasons I like collage art with kids is that it involves a few different techniques, all the while building something up!

Colours, tearing, cutting, sticking, drawing are all part of the process whilst creating a masterpiece!

Warm and Cool Colours

We used warm and cool colours, cool for the water background and warm for the fish. This creates a nice contrast.

The colour wheel below shows you the difference.

For discussion beforehand: warm colours remind us of the sun and fire and cool colours remind us of the sea and water and grass…

Fish Collage Materials

• Card stock – we used A3 size
• Assorted bits of coloured paper bits. We used warm and cool colours, however, you can make a fish collage with any colours you like, there are so many fish in the ocean!!
• Glue. When making a collage with kids I like to have plenty of glue and a paint brush. You can make your own glue by following this link. Alternatively, you can buy all the supplies you need from Amazon (affiliate link below)
• I had some markers on hand in case anyone wanted to add details – such as fins or eyes by drawing
• You can tear or cut bits of paper – scisors are alwasy handy!

I set up the table with all the materials, including scissors and glue. And we then got started on our backgrounds. Some children cut the pieces and others tore off little bits, both ways are perfect!

We had a chat about how when you look under the sea – or under water – the colors are not all the same, in fact there are many colours if you look carefully!

We filled all the white spaces, right to the corners!

And then we got started on our fish!

Most children drew their fish first with a light pencil line, this way they knew exactly where and what their fish looked like.

We looked through a few books to gather inspiration for our fish, and we all came to the conclusion that there are so many colours and shapes – you could pretty much make anything you wanted, making this the perfect easy kids art idea!

And my personal favourite below – we call this “Angry Fish.”

I made these with 4, 5 and 6-year-olds in two hours, so completely possible to squeeze into a day. This really is an easy kids art idea! Older children would start to apply more texture and possibly add more ‘things’ to the sea – like seaweed and sand and starfish!

Whilst we are able to create our own masterpieces this is all about the process and wonderfully good for all things fine motor and teaching those little fingers to control!