Shamrock Painting for St. Patrick's Day

Last Updated on March 8, 2024 by Sheryl Cooper

Inside: This shamrock painting for St. Patrick’s Day is simple enough for toddlers, but preschoolers love it, too. It’s also a great color mixing activity, learning what happens when blue and yellow are mixed!

If your toddlers and preschoolers love painting as much as mine, they will love this color mixing activity!

There’s very little set up involved (which busy teachers appreciate) and even busy toddlers (like mine) will stop and give it a try.

After mixing the paint colors, prints can be made on a shamrock printable (provided towards the bottom of this page).

A fun addition to your St. Patrick’s Day theme!

We love color mixing activities! And during St. Patrick’s Day we’ve mixed yellow and blue with a variety of ideas.

Some examples:

Mixing Green in a Baggie

Driving Cars to Make Green

Color-Mixing Shamrocks

This year I decided to continue our blue and yellow color mixing using mirrors!

Let me show you how easy it was.

Shamrock Painting for St. Patrick’s Day

Supplies

Yellow tempera paint
Blue tempera paint
Jumbo cotton swabs (or you can use paint brushes) *
Shamrock printable (scroll down towards bottom of this page)
Acrylic mirrors *

*Note About the Mirrors: I love the addition of the mirrors because of how slick the surface is. If you don’t have mirrors and don’t want to spend additional money purchasing them, you can use tinfoil, as we did in this shamrock art activity.

*Note About the Cotton Swabs: I happened to have a variety pack of cotton swabs and I pulled the jumbo size out for this activity. I love using cotton swabs in place of paintbrushes, but if you don’t have these (and I realize most don’t), you can use regular size cotton swabs or paintbrushes.

Preparation

Make enough copies of the shamrock printable depending on how many children will be involved.

You can trim the shamrocks if desired. In previous years I have trimmed them, but this year I decided not to. Your choice!

If using foil, cut enough pieces (approximately the size of a regular sheet of paper, or you can even go larger) for each child.

Setting up this Shamrock Painting Activity

Place mirrors on art table. If using foil, I would suggest placing them on trays .

Place a cotton swab at each spot.

Squeeze some yellow and some blue paint on top of the mirrors or foil.

Have shamrock printables close by.

Start Mixing!

Invite your children to sit at the table and start mixing the blue and the yellow paint.

Even my toddlers started noticing a new color – green – emerge as they mixed the paints around on the mirror.

Speaking of toddlers, they especially love this activity because of the action involved. It goes right along with their energy levels!

What I also love about this activity is that children can either spend a short amount of time or much longer. I had some children at the art table for a good 20 minutes, and that is a long time for a two year old!

Don’t be surprised if the hands get involved. The temptation to touch the paint on the slick mirror is strong! It’s nothing soap and water can’t wash off. And the colors still got mixed … by hand!

Making the Print

When your children show signs of wanting to stop mixing the paint (or they simply say “I’m done!” and start to walk away ….) grab the shamrock printable and make a print!

Here’s how:

Tell the child that they are going to press their shamrock paper face down on top of the paint that they just mixed.

Then, have them pat the paper as it sits on top of the paint. My two year olds didn’t get into this near as much as the three and four year olds did. Those older preschoolers really patted and rubbed! For younger children who are a bit hesitant, you can encourage them by saying “pat, pat, pat the paper!”.

Then, have them pick up the paper!

As I said earlier, you can always trim around the shamrock if you’d like. You could even glue it on black paper to make the colors pop!

Or, leave it as is like I did.

Using Plain Paper

If you would like to do this as a process art activity without the printable, use plain paper! This could be done any time of the year using plain paper, and you could change the colors.