Hand & Footprint Christmas Art

Two of our advent activities involved making art work with C's hand and footprints. A little redundant, possibly, but as I've emphasized in previous posts about our advent activities- this is for her and to do things together that are fun and Christmas-related. She loves to paint, and she especially loves when we paint her hands or feet to make a picture. It's simple, quick, and adorable. We now have two frame-worthy pieces to decorate and warm our home during the Christmas season while reminding us of sweet memories with our tiny girl.

Hand & Footprint Reindeer
We used regular tempera paint and an 8.5x11" sheet of white card stock (plain printer paper would be too thin and would wrinkle badly from the moisture of the paint). I started by painting her foot and pressing it onto the paper carefully. I also demonstrated to her (minus the paint) what we were going to do for each step before doing it so that she wouldn't think it was like finger painting where you swipe your hands all over the page to make the picture.

I painted her foot first and pressed it onto the center of the card stock toes up, heel down. Then I wiped it off with a damp paper towel (I had 4-5 nearby for this purpose). We painted her hands next, one at a time, and placed them at the top of the footprints to look like antlers. Finally, we used her thumb and first painted it black to make two eyes. Then we wiped it clean and painted it red to make a red reindeer nose.

In most other samples I've seen of this project the nose is all the way at the tip of the heel. For some reason when it was time to put the nose on, I just felt like that would look strange. We put ours in the middle and I think it turned out just fine. 

Handprint Christmas Tree

We did something very similar with her handprints and green paint to make a Christmas tree. Since we'd be using a series of many handprints that would be the same color, I just put some green paint on a paper plate and pressed her hand in it rather than painting her hand over and over again for each print. 

 She thought it was awesome that her hands were green like "Honk" (known to the rest of the world as the Incredible Hulk)

While undecorated (we were waiting for the handprints to dry) we will use some red paint on her finger tips to add berries/garland/"necklace" as she calls it, and some type of star at the top. 

Both of these projects took a total of about 10 minutes each. If you're doing it with multiple kids it will obviously take longer. You could use any kind of medium for the decorations too - googly eyes on the reindeer with a red pom-pom nose, felt or construction paper cut-outs for the tree decorations, glitter, you name it. We kept it simple since we're working with a 2-year old. Generally for that reason I avoid using glue and manytinypieces of anything. But with crafts like this, the sky is the limit. Perfect for those cold, dark December evenings after school or work when you can't go outside to play!

Has anyone else done cute holiday/Christmas hand or footprint art?? Tell us about it or link to it in a comment : )