How to Create Absolutely Beautiful Flowers with Coffee Filter Art

Below you’ll find directions for making beautiful coffee filter art flowers with kids.

I love art.

Science with kids is something else I adore.

And I love teaching children, whether they’re kindergartners, preschoolers, or my own son.

How about you? If so, why not combine all three of these passions into one super fun science and art project? That’s what we’ve done with our spring coffee filter art.

Are you following Fun-A-Day’s Flower & Plants Theme Pinterest board?

Coffee Filter Art Flowers are a Favorite

These coffee filter flowers are one of my favorite art projects to do with kids. Of course, my son likes to say that I have a lot of favorite art and science activities, “like you have a lot of favorite books!” He’s got a point, but I digress.

When I first tried this with my preschoolers, I went in knowing they’d enjoy it. However, I couldn’t have predicted their level of interest!! We were practically drowning in beautiful flowers when we were done.

And over the years I’ve discovered that wasn’t a one-time deal. Every group of kids I’ve done this with has gotten into it so much that we ended up with tons of beautiful spring art. What a great problem to have!

In addition to the enjoyment factor, the children learned a lot about science, math, and art concepts along the way.

Materials Needed for Spring Coffee Filter Art

Coffee filters (I know . . . you were so surprised this one made the list 😉 )
Liquid watercolors (Discount School Supply or Sargent)
Glass jars
Eye droppers
Wax paper (this is key!)

Liquid watercolors and eye droppers ready to make coffee filter art

Related: Coffee Filter Solar System

How to prep this activity

Using the school’s die-cut machine, I cut out a zillion flowers from a stack of coffee filters. Okay, so it probably wasn’t a zillion! I’m glad I was able to get my hands on a die-cut machine, as this project extended farther than I originally planned (meaning I had to go back a few times to make more coffee filter flowers)!

Hand-cutting the flowers wouldn’t have been difficult, though, just more time consuming. You can also have the kids free-hand cut their own flowers, or use a template to trace before cutting.

Next up, squirt some liquid watercolors into a few containers. I used a variety of old glass jars I had on-hand. I’ve found that the glass jars work best for holding the liquid watercolors, as the jars are less prone to tipping over. Unless you’re like me and you knock them over, of course!

Directions for Making Coffee Filter Art Flowers

I highly recommend that you place down a piece of wax paper to serve as each child’s work space. With each child, I placed a piece of wax paper down and wrote his name on it with permanent marker. The wax paper helped contain any escaping watercolors and made it easier to take the coffee filter flowers over to our drying rack.

Show the kids how to use an eye dropper in case they need that instruction (or that reminder). I reviewed how to use an eye dropper with the children, just in case.

Then let those little art scientists at it!

I loved watching how each kid took on their coffee filter flowers.

Some children excitedly splatted large amounts of paint onto the coffee filters at first. This led to a great discussion of over-saturation versus saturation!

Once they’d experimented with over-saturating the flowers, the kiddos were much more intentional about dropping the paint sparingly. Well, unless they were enthusiastically experimenting with over-saturation!

Using the eye droppers, the children watched how the watercolors were absorbed by the coffee filter flowers.

The first year we did this, we ended up doing this experiment on and off for more than 5 days. Every successive year I’ve tried this with kids, I’ve made sure to plan extra time for the project.

We enjoyed exploring with different colors and types of liquid watercolors. This allowed us to see that some were absorbed much quicker than others. A few of the kids and I explored this in-depth, “racing” some of the colors on the flowers. We found that the glitter watercolors were absorbed a lot less quickly than the regular watercolors. We hypothesized it was because the glitter watercolors are thicker.

In addition to saturation and absorption, we delved into color theory a bit too. There were grand exclamations about making new colors by mixing some of the paints!

The concept that red and yellow make orange is so much more meaningful to a child when she’s making that discovery herself. The kids also noticed that the darker colors sometimes overtook the lighter colors.

Related: Kid-Made Cupcake Liner Flowers

Learning with Beautiful Spring Flower Coffee Filter Art

Here are some of the concepts we explored with this awesome science and art project:

Absorption
Color mixing
Saturation
Fine motor skills
Color identification

These coffee filter flowers look gorgeous displayed in the window.

We decided we liked the flowers better when they’re taped directly to the window, as the colors are brighter. That’s in comparison to placing the flowers on a piece of contact paper to display in the window.

We even used these gorgeous coffee filter flowers to make mixed-media canvas art as Mother’s Day presents. I think they’d be great for gifts for anyone in the family, too.

Preschool Lesson Plans for Spring

Save time and jump right into hands-on, multi-sensory learning fun with done-for-you lesson plans. Each of our preschool lesson plan packs come with:

Printable plans (both a one-sheet grid plan and multi-page plans that describe the learning activities)
Whole group ideas
Small group activities
Center time activities
Book suggestions
Related printables (read below the photo for specific printables)
Blank, editable lesson plan outlines in case you want to rearrange a few things on your own!

Click on each photo below to read more about the lesson plans: