Tissue butterfly art

Here’s a quick and easy tissue butterfly art project kids can make for a Spring.

You might also like our 3D monarch butterfly with anatomy labels

Butterflies are one of my favourite crafting themes—and why not? They’re so colourful and pretty. 

We already have symmetrical butterfly painting, craft stick yarn butterflies, and a realistic 3D monarch butterfly, to name a few. But you can never have too many butterfly crafts, right?

What’s one more?

This craft is so easy you can literally make it in five minutes. If you want to extend the project and make it more interesting for older kids, try collaging more tissue paper into the background to create clouds or gardens. Get creative with it. 

You can see I’ve done that in one of the examples by twisting and coiling strips of white tissue paper. Glueing them onto blue, they are meant to be clouds. You could do something similar on a green background to make a flower garden.

Are you ready to get started?

How to make Easy Tissue Butterfly Art

You will need:

• Tissue paper in three colours
• Coloured card stock
• A glue stick
• Scissors
• Sharpie marker

How to:

Cut a square of tissue paper so it’s slightly smaller than your backing sheet of coloured card stock. Cut a second piece in a different colour that’s the same length, but narrower in width than your first piece.

Scrunch the larger piece of tissue paper vertically, pinching it tight in the middle. Scrunch the second piece the same way and layer it on top of the first.

Cut a strip about 5cm (1.9″) wide and fold it over several times so it becomes a narrow strip approx 1cm (0.4″) wide. Place glue on the back of your strip and wrap it around the centre of your butterfly.

Glue the butterfly to paper.

Cut four more pieces of tissue paper the same colour as the strip, approx 8x8cm (3×3″), and screw them into little balls. Glue three underneath the strip and one above to make the head.

Use a sharpie marker to draw antennae.

See? Told you it was super easy!

Now get creative with it and add tissue paper clouds or flowers to the background. Or just leave it as is.

Tissue paper is so fun to create with!

Here are some more tissue paper ideas for kids:

• Make some geometric tissue paper lanterns from recycled containers
• This egg carton tissue paper reef doubles as a night light
• Here are some gorgeous textured tissue paper egg cards
• These glow bugs are made using tissue-paper covered yoghurt tubs
• Here’s a set of Mason jar Earth Day lanterns, decorated in tissue paper designs