Watercolor & Recycled Newspaper Flower Craft

We love finding new ways to craft with recycled materials and this easy recycled newspaper flower craft is definitely one of our favorites!

Do you always have newspapers lying around? We don’t get the newspaper delivered to our home but we do get the weekly store ads in the mail and we have neighbors that are always happy to hand over their old newspapers. Doing recycled crafts for kids with a newspaper is awesome because it is so very affordable and there are so many ways to do activities with it!

Grab your liquid watercolors and let’s start making this easy recycled newspaper flower craft!

Not only is this craft fun for kids but it’s also a perfect activity to build fine motor skills. Using dropper and cutting with scissors are excellent ways for preschoolers to work fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. There’s lots of learning that that can be had in arts and crafts!

Watercolor & Recycled Newspaper Flower Craft

Materials Needed:

• Newspaper
• Liquid watercolors
• Dropper Bottles or Pipettes
• Scissors
• Glue
• Construction Paper

The first step in this simple recycled newspaper craft is to lay out your newspaper on a table. Next, fill your dropper bottles with liquid watercolors.

It’s really simple, just let kids add color to the newspaper with droppers. Easy right? But the kids LOVE it!

Using droppers is a great way to develop fine motor skills but if you don’t have them use can always use watercolor paints. Just make sure to add a bit of extra water to your watercolor paints so that the color will absorb into the newspaper.

When your colored newspaper is dry it’s time to cut out your flowers.

We tried cutting a few flower shapes but my preschoolers preferred to just cut out circles, which looked great in our finished craft. We cut out circles of all sizes so that we could layer them on the construction paper. In addition to the circles, we also cut a few rectangular strips to be used as our flower stems.

The last step is to glue the colored newspaper circles onto the construction paper. We layered all our newspaper circles from largest to smallest which gave our flowers a 3-D look and made them really stand out.

When the glue is dry you can hang your recycled newspaper flowers up. They are bright and colorful! Scroll down to see how great they turned out. We have a whole garden of recycled flowers all over our playroom.

I love how bold the colors are and how they blend together. My kids really loved doing this simple craft. I highly recommend you give it a try! 

Looking for more crafts and activities? Check out our index for 100+ plus kids activities! Find activities by theme, materials, skills, age and much more!

Originally published May 13, 2016. Updated March 18, 2020.