Craft Stick Scrape Painting

Craft stick scrape painting is a tactile, textural process art activity that kids will love. And not just preschoolers—you don’t need to be little to appreciate the gorgeous results you can get from scraping paint across a page!

This art can get messy, but I promise it’s worth it.

You might also like our kaleidoscope sponge prints

One thing I haven’t shared enough of in all my years of blogging is process art. Not because I don’t love it, but because I’m a perfectionist at heart and get caught up wanting a stellar finished product.

My results seem more important than the process, especially since I share them with the world.

But results aren’t everything, especially for kids. Focussing too heavily on results can make them afraid to experiment and try new things. It can make them afraid to make mistakes.

When you’re creating for the sake of it, it’s a completely different feeling to creating with a result in mind. It’s experimental, fun, can be relaxing and even aid anxiety.

With this craft stick scrape painting activity, kids can experiment by creating different patterns and textural effects using jumbo craft sticks. Anything goes.

I’ve highlighted three different techniques to get you started but feel free to come up with more.

General scrape painting tips

I’ve used jumbo craft sticks (affiliate link) because they’re quick and easy to grab a clean one for your next scrape. But you can use whatever you want to scrape the paint. If you have no craft sticks, they could be easily substituted for a scrap of thick recycled cardboard
Use 2-3 colours per artwork, or shades of the same colour to avoid the art turning a murky grey/brown

Although process art is about the activity itself, the results can still be pretty cool. I’ve already repurposed some of these paintings into colourful Easter Egg art!

Craft Stick scrape painting three different ways

You will need:

Jumbo craft sticks (affiliate link)
Acrylic paint (affiliate link)—in tubes works best for this activity, but if you have large bottles use a brush to transfer blobs of it onto stick or paper as needed
Decent quality art paper, I’ve used A4 size
A larger piece of paper or newspaper to lay under your artwork to catch the scrapes that go over the page’s edge

How to:

Straight Scrape

Straight scraping is the most straightforward. Put dots of paint on your page, lining the top with one colour, then the edge with a different colour.

Drag a craft stick through the paint and down the page.

Use a clean craft stick to drag the second colour across the page.

You can vary it up by dabbing the paint all over the page instead of neatly dotting the top and edges. Or you can go with a single vertical scrape for a different look.

Here are more straight scrape results.

The Circular Scrape

The circular scrape works by dabbing the paint on the stick itself, then dragging it in a circle on your page.

Fill the page with circles.

You can experiment by adding more colour partway through to change the look of some of the circles.

The Wiggle Scrape

You can wiggle scrape by dabbing paint on the page OR the craft stick. Or both! The important part is that the scrape is ‘wiggled’ across the page.

I call this one Stormy Seas.

Here’s a version where I’ve used the leftover paint on the stick from scrape one, plus added extra dabs to the page as well.

I know you shouldn’t have favourites with process art, but I can’t help it. The last one’s my favourite!

With little kids, hang your favourites on the wall. Even if it looks like a mess to you, it shows you value their effort and helps them feel proud of their work.

With bigger kids, you can keep the art to work into more complex projects in the form of collage. I’ll be doing this with our Process art Easter Eggs (soon to be shared).

Once your paint has dried, turn it into Arty Eggs.

More arty ideas for kids

Create gorgeous symmetrical butterflies using squish art
Spring flower stamping is so fun using sponge shapes
Solar system art is another cool sponge art idea that incorporates masking to get a super cool result