Painting Like Eric Carle – Homemade Easter Egg Napkin Rings Craft for Kids

Learn how to paint like Eric Carle, using wax paper, acrylic paint, and a fun scraping technique. 

We’ve been making lots of Easter egg crafts this week in my home daycare. These homemade Easter Egg napkin rings are a terrific Easter craft for kids to make.  Not only are they colourful and pretty, the paint technique is so cool!  Inspired by the great Eric Carle, we’ve scraped and blended our colours together to using a fun painting process that kids of all ages will enjoy. 

Have you ever looked at a piece of Eric Carle art, and wondered how he makes his artwork look the way it does?  Don’t you just love it?  It’s so cheery and bright.  It has depth and dimension, and it’s so unique.

Well, recently, I watched this slideshow by Eric Carle, and I was delighted to learn see how he applies layers of paint to a sheet of tissue paper to achieve that beautiful effect that we know and love so well.

I was surprised by how easy the process looked, and was curious to try painting “Eric Carle style” myself.

Guess what.  It was totally fun!  I got right into it, and ended up creating several different sheets of paper in all different colours.  They were just beautiful, and I knew we’d be able to craft with them.

I’m going to show you how to make some coloured sheets of your own, and how your kids can use them to make Easter Napkin rings for your Easter dinner table this year.

Making my Eric Carle style painted papers:

For your convenience, this post contains affiliate links. 

Instead of using tissue paper like Mr. Carle does, I used wax paper.

For my painting tools, I used brushes, sponges, an expired credit card, and plastic vegetable netting.