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Stained Glass Painting with Bottle Lids and Wax Paper

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Teach your kids how to make stained glass art with paint, bottle lids and wax paper. This is a fun art activity for toddlers and preschoolers and the results are beautiful, and look just like stained glass when displayed on a window.

I love the look of stained glass, so when I find a cool stained glass art project that my daycare kids can do, I’m all over it. Recently my toddlers and preschoolers made these gorgeous “stained glass” paintings using bottle lids, paints and wax paper!

When it comes to easy art techniques for kids, this one is the bomb!
stained glass painting on wax paper - an easy and gorgeous art project for kids by Happy Hooligans

For your stained glass painting project you’ll need:

 

wax paper, paint and bottle lid

For your convenience, I’ve included Amazon Affiliate links in this post.  I receive a small commission when you shop through these links.  Thank you for your support. 

I suspect that any paint would work for this project, but I chose Crayola Washable Kids’ Paints because of their vibrant colours and glossy, translucent quality.

The stained glass painting process:

I gave each child a square of wax paper, and encouraged them to cover the entire surface with their paints.

toddlers and preschoolers painting wax paper

I thought they would simply brush the paint all over the waxed paper, but a couple of them experimented by dabbing their paint on the wax paper.  That’s when my plan came together. In case you’re wondering, the outer photos in the next image were taken under fluorescent lighting, while the middle one was taken in natural light in front of a window.kids' stained glass painting in 3 easy steps

Painting with bottle lids on wax paper:

  1. Have your little one dab paint all over their wax paper.  Splat it on nice and thick.  The closer together your paint dots are, the better it is for blending the colours together in the next step.
  2. Next, give them good-sized plastic lid.  Our Gatorade lids were perfect, but the flat bottom of a glass or jar would  work too.
  3. Now, press and twist the lid into the paint, blending the dots together.  Occasionally swipe the lid against a piece of paper  to clean it off, to prevent the dots from becoming too “muddy”.

We were all so impressed by the finished results!  Some of the younger hooligans simply spread their paint around, and some chose to paint sparingly, and skipped the bottle lid step. Each child decided how they wanted to their project to look. stained glass art made by toddlers 2 photos

And they all turned out great.  Here’s the whole collection:

6 stained glass paintings on waxed paper

When the paintings had dried, I held them up to the window for the hooligans to see, and WOW!

stained glass painting hung on window with light shining through

Isn’t this impressive?

To complete the project, I cut out some simple card stock frames, and the hooligans glued them to them onto their paintings.

Then we taped them up in the window, and when the sun broke through the clouds and shone through the waxed paper, the paintings were even more beautiful!

stained glass art with contstruction paper frame

What a gorgeous way to add a pop of Spring colour to the windows!

Imagine painting a piece large enough to completely cover a window?  Or to cover the panes in a french door?  Hmmm, there may just be an idea for a future project here!

More Stained Glass Painting Projects for Kids:

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Comments

  4. Jennifer

    Wow, that would look amazing in a French door. We have a few paned windows here – we need to get busy making some amazing ‘stained glass’

    Reply

  7. Aleacia

    These turned out so pretty! We’ve never painted on wax paper before, I’ll have to give it a go with the girls!
    Thanks for linking up to our Eric Carle Inspired post! 🙂

    Reply

  12. Trish

    My 4-year old and 5-year old (and Mommy, of course!) did this project today. I had the same paints you used, but ran out of several colors early, as we didn’t have much in the little jars to begin with. We then used Crayola washable fingerpaint. This worked better, because then they could just squeeze it out of the tube. They weren’t really getting enough on with the paintbrush anyway, so this worked great! Will let them dry tonight and make frames tomorrow. BTW…a milk cap works wonderfully, as you showed above. The cap gives some texture to the art and almost makes it looks leafy. We tried a yogurt cup too, but liked the results better with the milk cap. Thanks for the idea!

    Reply

    • happyhooligans

      You are so welcome! It’s so funny that you used the finger paints, Trish, because that’s on my to-do list too! After doing it with the other paints, I figured it would be a great project to try with finger paints! So glad it worked well for you! I can’t wait to try it now. And yes, who knew the humble, little milk cap would come in so handy?

      Reply

  13. Nikitaland

    This is by far the coolest craft project I have seen in a long time! May I do a blog post on this with your photographs of what you created? I want to share this so badly with everyone, not to mention, I want to try this craft too to see what I come up with! Have a great day!

    Reply

    • happyhooligans

      Glad you liked it! When it comes to using photos, most bloggers are fine with you using a single (one) photo from their blog post, as long as you provide a link back to the original bloggers site for the instructions. It’s still a good idea to check with the blogger first (so thank you for asking!). I don’t know of any bloggers who would permit you to use more than one photo, or to write up your own instructions for the craft or activity while using photos that are not your own. The general idea is that if you’re going to share someone’s idea (and we love it when you do), that you direct your readers to that blogger’s site in order to get the instructions. Thanks again for checking first. Have fun if you try it at your house!

      Reply

  16. Debbi Douglas

    WOW, this is fantastic! I have a few Adult Clients who would love to do this as well.
    Thanks so much for your lovely tutorials happyhooligans.

    Reply

  17. Veens

    We have done the lid thing on chart paper, but never on wax paper. I just know what we will be doing tomorrow 🙂

    Reply

  22. Joyce

    Would like to share that I did this with the handicapped adults I work with and they turned out beautiful. We used the painted wax paper as a dyed Easter Egg. I had cut out an egg frame from a cereal box painted white and we taped the painted wax paper to the back of the egg frame. Look beautiful on the window !!

    Reply

  24. Mindy

    Does the frame need to be hollow on the inside such as a box within a box for the sunlight to come through or is entirely backed by a cardstock and that will still allow the light to shine through to the wax paper???
    I am about to try this with my 5 & 1/2 yr old daughter. It is a special Mommy and Me day while my 12?yrold went to Disneyland with friends.

    Reply

  26. Joyce anderson

    Hang the wax paper art on a window by gluing 1″ foam strips to each side, like a picture frame. Then attach 2 small suction cups to 2 corners, and hang in a window.

    Reply

  27. Tessa

    I’m wonder the same thing is there another sheet of wax paper over top of the painted wax paper before you slid and stamp withy the cap?

    Reply

  28. Shani

    This sounds great for my Kdg kiddos. I have a large window I would like to cover and I think I will just attach it with painters tape to make it look like a frame. I will also use the painters tape to cut in some shapes for the stained glass effect.

    Reply

  29. Nancy W

    your site would be much more appealing if you moved that “Shares” bar on the left side of the screen.. I covers part of the instructions and personally it turns me away from trying your projects because I am not going to try to read instructions THROUGH an obstruction on the screen.

    Reply

    • happyhooligans

      Thank you so much for letting me know, Nancy. I had no idea. For me, it shows outside of the body of the post. No-one else has ever let me know it covers the body of the post. If I’d known, I would’ve moved it sooner. Let me see what I can do about it, and thank you for the heads up!

      Reply

  30. Miss T. Esl Arts And Crafts

    Hi there I’m Rosemary.For 5 years now I am in The Middle
    East as ELL teacher.I have just encounter your website searching for
    arts for my coming lesson. I reckon that, I need to
    modify this a tad to suit perfectly for my kids and this will probably be brilliant.Many thanks for sharing your mind and writing it all together.

    Reply

  32. Patty

    Lovely!! (And perfect timing) I was just going to do balloon prints on paper, using my favorite Biocolor paint, but now will be painting on wax paper!

    Reply

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