DIY Temporary Tattoos

DIY Temporary Tattoos

Small children like to draw and colour shapes and characters when they first start to use pencils and colours on paper. They love to draw small houses and flowers. Wouldn’t it be fun if you could make some temporary tattoos of their art and let them show off their artistic skills by wearing them on? The kids will surely love sporting these tattoos, especially because they had a hand in designing the piece! The professional-looking temporary tattoos are a fun way to get your child to take interest and try new art ideas by themselves.

You can also help out in this activity by adding your own pictures and by assisting the little ones in cutting, pasting and placing the tattoos. The best thing about these tattoos, apart from them being your child’s master pieces, is that it is a great way to experiment with tattoos without altering or harming your skin! So stop standing around and waiting, go give it a try!

Materials needed

• 1 sheet of Silhouette Temporary Tattoo Paper
• Paper with printed clip art that your child can colour in (or you can also use a blank sheet of printer paper and them draw the entire tattoo themselves, a small house, a flower, squiggly designs- just anything colourful that your child come up with will do!)
• A Printer and scanner

Steps:

• The first thing to do is find clipart that can be coloured in and set it in a Word Document. You can find many cute pictures online, so feel free to type in your choice and select the pictures. When you set the images in the word file you can leave some space so that your child can draw ‘clip arts’ of their own in these spaces.
• You can now print out the page on a normal sheet and have your child colour it in as they like. Encourage them to draw their own choice of pictures too!
• When they are done colouring, you can scan the image (this will create a digital page to print using the tattoo paper).
• Now place one sheet of the tattoo paper in the printer and print out the digital image of your child’s coloured tattoo clip arts. You will receive a separate self-adhesive cover along with the tattoo paper. It is a transparent cover adhered to a paper. When you have printed the scanned image on the tattoo paper, you should remove the clear page from its sheet and place it on the tattoo paper. This clear sheet will stick to the paper really well. This is actually quite simple to do, and not as complicated as it sounds.
  (You will find that the tattoo paper comes with instructions on how to use it with the help of a Silhouette machine, but you needn’t be worried about it. It works really well without the machine too).
• You can cut out the tattoos after you place the clear adhesive sheet on the printed sheet that you prepared.
• Now for the great reveal, remove the clear sheet from each tattoo and place it face down on the skin. Use a wet towel or tissue paper to slightly dab and press over the tattoo. Now you can gently remove the paper and you have the temporary tattoo with your kid’s art!!

Kids will have so much fun doing this project and this would make a fun party activity as well. The possibilities of these tattoos are endless, and if your child is old enough to design higher quality of sketches and styled images they would make even better tattoos; and as a parent, it would be pretty awesome to sport one on yourself too!