Elf Painting without Paint!

Teachers ... need a mess-free art activity for kids? Take a look at these paintings without paint ideas for kids using elf drawings.

It can be tricky to get a darker skin tone for kids to use in their artwork.  Start the skin area with a peachy lighter skin toned marker.  Allow it to dry.  Then slowly going over it with a light brown colored pencil.  This will give you more control of the darkness.  You can use a combination of colored pencils to get just the right skin tone.  Even fair-skinned elves will look even cuter by using a pink colored pencil to make rosy cheeks.  Of course, students don't need to match the elve's skin tone to their own.  This is just an idea of how to get a variety of skin tones with limited supplies.

Watercolor pencils work just like colored pencils.  It's nice to be able to layer colored so that they mix when they get wet.  The color ends up looking a little softer than coloring with markers.  To help the elf's colors pop a little, I used markers to outline each area and a light blue marker to put a shadow in the white areas. 

If you like the elve's in this demonstration, you can find the New Year's Eve Rockin Elf Resolutions lesson on my website.  It has how to draw elf pages and also New Year's resolution writing pages.  You can also find it on TpT. 

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