Christmas Painting Ideas for Toddlers at Home

Potato printing takes me back to when I was a child. I find it to be quite a nostalgic Christmas Craft, and one I wanted to recreate again on the blog!

These nostalgic Christmas painting ideas for toddlers, include a snowman painted with a carrot, a Christmas tree painted using a stick of celery, and a Penguin printed with a potato! Each of the paintings are finished with googly eyes and some key features.

You may choose to simply have a go at these with your toddler as a fun Christmas painting activity. Or you may choose to use them for Christmas in some way – stay til the end for some ideas on how you could use your toddlers paintings this year!

Christmas Painting Ideas for Toddlers at Home

The following ideas are all Christmas painting ideas for toddlers using vegetables, and where possible these can be reused simply by cutting of the painted parts!

You can do all of these crafts with other household items also – as always be creative with what you have and enjoy the process!

Snowman Painting Using Just One Carrot!

For this painting you’ll need just one carrot to create the body and face of the snowman!

Take your carrot and cut off both ends so that you are left with a big and small circle to print with.

I recommend when using stamps of any kind for painting that you use a paper plate to put the paint on for dipping in.

Use one end of the carrot for the face and the other for the body (tip – less is more when it comes to this kind of painting!)

Once you have painted the main part of the snowman you will want to add some features to bring it to life!

The best way to do this is to let the paint dry first (if you are making a lot, by the time you go back to adding features to the first then it may be dry – alternatively a hair dryer – used with caution! – is a great way to speed up the drying!)

Use black paint for the hat (or a felt tip hat drawn on)

Add my favourite googly eyes next with a little glue – This brings any character instantly to life!

Draw or paint on a carrot nose (or you could glue on a button) and add a small mouth too.

Using the end of a pencil dipped in paint, stamp on some snowman buttons.

And finally add a scarf or bow as we did to keep your snowman lovely and warm! (We found a glue gun was required for this part!)

Top Tip – If you don’t want to waste the carrot afterwards, simply cut off the painted ends and use the rest🥕

The Celery Painted Christmas Tree

For the Christmas Tree painting, we used a stick of celery, cut into shorter stalks to create a lovely tree effect.

Again we are going to use both ends of the celery so as not to waste any if we can help it.

Use the curve of the celery to create up-turned branches and fill the middle of the tree by stamping all over.

To make the trunk of the tree we used the other end of the celery and printed it upside down.

Using the another stick of celery, with yellow or gold paint, create a star shape at the top of the tree as shown.

And finally, add some Christmas baubles using the end of a pencil to make it really festive and fun!

Of course the google eyes and face are optional but I just couldn’t resist!

The Potato Penguin Painting

For our festive penguins, we used a potato to make the body, including the wings (I had considered an unripe avocado as this is the PERFECT shape, but I couldn’t justify the expense!)

There are two ways to make the black and white parts. The first is to simply paint a white circle on the potato and black around it (you may find this tricky with little ones) or you can do it the way did, which is in parts. We had a small cut out potato circle for the white tummy, and then another potato with a carved out middle so it only stamped the black edge.

For the wings we cut potato wedge shapes of potato and stamped them on using the same paint

Finally, we used the pencil end once more for the feet and beak in some fun orange paint and added another googly eye!

3 Ways to Make the most of these Christmas Painting Ideas for Toddlers

You may just want to have lots of fun trying out different stamps and playing with the paint – but if you want to use your creations afterwards, here are some fun ways to use your Christmas paintings:

Create your own wrapping paper – Why not lay out a giant roll of paper and cover in Christmas stamps and use as homemade wrapping paper!
Use on Christmas cards for friends and family – This is always easiest if you cut around any paintings your child has done afterwards, and then stick to the blank card for a fun personal Christmas card!
Make some Gift tags – Making labels for presents is super easy – just cut around the painting, punch a hole at the top, and thread some string through the hole