We combined optical illusion art with crayon resist art to make a super cool Halloween project for kids. Your kiddos can make a really cool spiderweb using a wax resist (crayon resist) art technique with a white crayon and some Bingo daubers!
Crayon resist art is a neat art project for kids of all ages, which is perfect for my large age span in my house. What I love about crayon resist (wax resist) art is that it’s also a great science activity.
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What is Crayon Resist Art?
Wax resist art is all the rage on Pinterest. Art made with two materials that repel or resist each other is called Resist Art. For our crayon resist art activity, we are using a white crayon and Bingo daubers in a range of colors. We love making fun projects with crayons, like our recycled crayon suncatchers, for example.
Materials Often Used to Make Resist Art
You can also make resist art with wax candles, tape, glue, rubber bands and more! We’ve also played with layers of paper to make a cute pumpkin painting for preschoolers and have made glue resist chalk pastel pumpkins that turned out pretty awesome!
What is Optical Illusion Art?
Optical Illusion Art (Op Art) is designed to trick the eye by combining and layering shapes, patterns, or lines. For our project, we chose to do a simple handprint op-art with lines.
You’ve probably seen projects like this all over Pinterest. It’s a super popular project to do with kids because it’s totally cool!
We wanted to combine our optical illusion art with crayon resist art instead of following the traditional method for creating optical illusion handprints.
How to Make Optical Illusion Handprints
You can also make Op-Art handprints with markers and paper. To make optical illusion handprints, you can trace your hand, then use a ruler to make a series of straight lines across your hand.
You then use a black sharpie to make a curve from the start of one line, then up to the middle of the line above it, and then back down to the end of the first line as shown below.
Supplies You Need to Make Crayon Resist Art
I always try to use supplies that I have on hand or that I’ve used for other projects. Crayon resist art is super easy and can be done with some basic art supplies that you probably already have at home.
It’s Super Easy to Make Resist Art with a Crayon and Bingo Markers
Use your white crayon to draw an image of a spiderweb or trace your hand. You won’t be able to see what you are writing because of the white crayon on white paper, which might be challenging for a young child. It’s okay to make mistakes! My 10yr old gave herself 6 fingers!
To make our creepy optical illusion handprints, we drew lines across our fingers and hand with a slight arch. Draw horizontal arches all the way up the hand and fingers.
Use your bingo markers to color over the image. You may need to wipe any excess ink off of you push too hard, but we found that our markers dried super fast.
The girls colored until they revealed their drawing. It was so fun to see Science at work in our resist art! Our final results turned out beautiful!
Find More Halloween STEAM Activities
Find some more Halloween STEAM activities for kids!
Halloween Binary Code Joke Cards
In today’s digital world, binary code is perhaps one of the most important number systems.
Check out one of the easiest ways to learn binary code and grab these free Halloween joke cards!!
We Put the Boo in KaBOOm with this STEAM Activity
We set out to use items around the house to observe how a chemical reaction produces a new substance. Just kidding, we set out to make something EXPLODE.
To do that, we sat down and learned all about acids, bases, and chemical reactions and applied what we knew to our daily lives. I bored the kids with chemical equations and talked their ears off until surely they thought we weren’t doing anything exciting. Then, things went kaBOOm and they were thrilled!
How to Make Spooky Ghost Sounds STEM Activity
We paired a book with a simple physics activity for kids to make a spooky ghost sounds STEM activity! This Spooky Ghost Sounds STEM Halloween Activity is a fantastic way to incorporate a simple physics experiment with some Halloween fun!
Pumpkin Balance Stack STEAM Challenge
This pumpkin balance activity is great for kids of all ages! Can you complete the Balancing Pumpkins STEAM Challenge? How many pumpkins can you stack?
Silly Pumpkin Faces Activity
Learn about faces and emotions with this silly pumpkin face activity! These are pretty darn fun to play with! My little Thea calls them her “funny pumpkins” and she’s been playing with them throughout the last two days!
This is such a fun way to get into the holiday spirit and involve your toddler in some G-rated spooky fun!!
Exploding Pumpkin STEAM Challenge
Fall is such a fun time for STEAM activities from pumpkins to potions and every spooky thing in between, I love how many great projects fall into the season!
My kids really wanted to make a pumpkin explode. We’ve been talking about it since this Summer and we were super excited to try out some chemical and physical reactions to create some exploding and erupting pumpkins!
Preschool Pumpkin Investigation - Learning About Scientific Inquiry
Fall is a great time to investigate some of our favorite seasonal things — like pumpkins!! We’ve been doing so many activities with pumpkins that the employees at our Walmart keep asking me what I am doing buying so many!
This preschool pumpkin investigation is fantastic for young learners like my little Thea who isn’t quite ready for any of our other pumpkin activities. From exploding pumpkins to painting pumpkins, we’ve already done a fair share of pumpkin activities this year!
It's Not Magic, It's Pumpkin Paper Circuits!
My girls are super artistic. I love trying STEAM activities that incorporate their artistic side to teach them scientific concepts. This is a great STEAM activity to learn about simple circuits and parallel circuits and then apply that circuitry knowledge with some artistic flair to make pumpkin paper circuits!
How to Make Preschool Pumpkin Art with Cotton Swabs
We are getting ready to go back to school next week. Back to school always makes me excited for fall. It’s right around the corner. My youngest two girls and I have been busy working on some fun fall projects including this preschool pumpkin art made with Qtips!
How to Make Beautiful Chalk Pastel Glue Resist Art Pumpkins
You can absolutely make beautiful chalk pastel pumpkin art with your kids by using a glue resist art method. I did this project with my toddler! Yes, you read that right! I know what you are thinking…how in the world did I get a 2yr old to draw like that?
Learn about Static Electricity with this Zombie Crossing Activity!
This static electricity zombie crossing STEAM activity is super easy and eerily fun! With only a few supplies needed, your walking dead will be up and moving in no time! This activity is so much fun and you can make all sorts of different shapes to test!
Leftover Candy Corn Unplugged Coding Preschool Sequences Activity
Use your leftover Halloween candy to learn how to code sequences with this unplugged coding preschool sequences activity.
Composing & Decomposing the Number 10 with Candy Corn!
A great activity for preschool and kindergarten aged kiddos is working hands-on with objects to learn addition and subtraction. We decided to work with candy corn to compose and decompose the number 10, but you can use other objects such as m&ms, fruit loops, popcorn, legos, etc.
Leave No Trace Behind Candy Chemistry Challenge
It’s October and that means a ton of candy is coming to a household near you in the very near future! We don’t let the kids eat all of their candy. We pick at it and they eat a few pieces here and there, but let’s be real, there are some candies that no one really likes to eat.
We like to use those candies for experiments! In this yummy experiment, we are testing to see if sour candy is acidic with a simple acid-base reaction.
Download Your Free Halloween Activity Worksheets for Kids
These Free Halloween Activity worksheets contain a few different exercises for kids of different learning levels, including: I-Spy, Word Search, Number Recognition, Letter Recognition, Pumpkin Coloring Page, & Less Than or Greater Than Pumpkins!
Ogre Slime: Oozing Halloween Slime Sensory Fun!
Learn about molecules, polymers, and chemical reactions with this oozing ogre slime Halloween sensory activity!
31 Nights of Halloween STEAM Activities
Get ready for 31 nights of Halloween STEAM activities with easy spooky STEAM projects filled with ghosts, zombies, spiders & more!
Meet Toni, the Maker Mom behind Our Family Code
Hey there, I’m Toni! I’m a software engineer and Maker Mom that finds my joy in unleashing my children’s curiosity by exploring STEAM concepts with my fantastic five!
When I’m not chasing toddlers or raising tweens, you can find me tearing things up and putting them back together over here at Our Family Code.
I am the owner and content creator of multiple educational websites designed to increase access to STEAM & STEM education with a focus on teaching computer science and coding to kids of all ages!
You can also find out more about me by visiting ToniGardner.com!
Sarah
Wednesday 26th of September 2018
This is such a fun activity to do with kids
Harassedmom (@laurakim123)
Monday 17th of September 2018
How clever is this!!! I am saving this one to do with the kids!
Toni
Monday 17th of September 2018
It was so much fun and not messy to do with Bingo daubers, which is totally a plus!