Every holiday season, I make a handprint craft with my children. I enjoy unpacking the crafts every year and comparing how much my kids’ hands have grown. Last year, we made Santa Claus Salt Dough Handprint Ornaments. In a prior Christmas season, I made Essential Oil Salt Dough Ornaments and included the tiny fingerprints from my daughter. This year I created a Christmas Cardinal Handprint Craft with my crew. This craft works well for our family, which includes children from toddler to teen. There is plenty of room on the canvas for a larger handprint!
Keep reading to find out how we made this easy painting craft. This project uses simple materials, and can be modified to suit to match various home decor styles.
Gather up the following items:
First, be sure to cover your worksurface with a vinyl tablecloth or newsprint. Unwrap your canvas (mine came primed and on clearance – yipee!). Start by painting the sky, making sure to also paint all the canvas edges. I chose to use two colors of blue paint, and add streaks of titanium white. This reminded me of how a winter sky can look before snow.
Allow this base layer to dry thoroughly. I left mine for a few hours, then came back to add in the branch details. Next, add a branch for each handprint Cardinal. I am expecting a baby in the spring, so I added an extra branch with the plan to paint a small bird’s nest with an egg. This egg turned out looking more like a chicken egg than a Cardinal egg, but I believe it’s the thought that counts with art like this!
Then, allow the branches to dry completely before moving on to the next step. When the branches have dried, paint each child’s hand with red paint (I used a combination of scarlet and crimson for this step) and carefully press a print in place on top of each branch. The thumb becomes the Cardinal’s “crest” and the fingers represent feathers.
Don’t stress if a wiggly hand makes a handprint smear (like our son’s did). Any of these details can be cleaned up later using more of the blue “sky” paint. Next, start adding the bird details. I used a mixture of my crimson and scarlet paints again to create wings in each palm. Then, use black to add the legs and classic Cardinal face mask. Orange and yellow should be used to create beaks and white for the glint of each eye. Some of the inspiration images I found on Pinterest showed pinecones or snowflake details, but I liked the simplicity of the birds on the bare branches for my painting.
Allow the painting to fully dry and find a great spot to display your creation. I know I’ll appreciate looking back every year and remembering the hands that created our family of Cardinal babes.
Jackie Baird Richardson is an interior designer, editor at The WON and avid junker. Watch for her design tips and occasional crafting ideas, bringing the outdoors indoors. View all posts by Jackie Richardson
