Earth Day Handprint Art

Celebrate Earth Day with this Earth Day Handprint Art! All six templates are free printables you can use to create these designs. Use this art as a lesson to learn more about Earth Day and the importance of protecting our planet.

RELATED: Earth Day Watercolor Art

This handprint art is a simple and fun activity to do with kids this Earth Day. And the finished artwork can be hung around your home or classroom for months to come as reminders of how important it is to take care of our planet!

Be sure to add the date to the back so you can save and remember these handprint keepsakes.

Supplies Needed

• Earth Day Printables – you can get them sent to you at the bottom of the post.

• Non-Toxic Tempera Paint – green, white, pastel blue, and medium blue

• Paintbrushes – medium

How to Make this Earth Day Handprint Art

1. Set up your work station.

Handprint art can get messy, so prepping everything before starting helps a lot! First off, download and print out the Earth Day printables that you want to use (get them sent to you at the bottom of this post) and bring them to your workspace.

Gather up your paints and brushes. We like to dispense a blob of each color of paint onto a palette, paper plate, or a clean yogurt lid saved from the recycling bin.

These printables only feature handprints (no footprints) so we find it’s usually easiest to wash paint off in the sink. Having a bowl of warm, soapy water near your workspace can be helpful though, along with baby wipes, clean rags, or paper towels.

2. Apply paint.

Choose your color of non-toxic tempera paint according to the design you’re working with. All the designs shown here use simple one-color handprints, with the exception of the “Happy Earth Day” design. For this one, we wanted to make an Earth-inspired handprint – we’ll show you how below!

First, apply green patches on your child’s hand. We didn’t worry about keeping it geographically accurate and the paint patches don’t have to be perfectly tidy.

Working fairly quickly so that the paint on your child’s hand doesn’t dry, we then filled in the gaps with blue paint to look like water.

3. Make the handprint.

Once your child’s entire hand is covered, guide them in placing their hand onto the paper, pressing down to make the handprint.

When they lift their hand away, you’ll be left with a beautiful Earth-inspired print!

Help your child wash away the paint remaining on their hand, and repeat this process as many times as needed.

The rest of the designs all feature solid-colored handprints, so the process is even simpler.

For the recycle page and Earth with flowers printable we used a regular green. For the Earth flower we used a lime green, a light blue for the bee, and white for the Earth with words.

Get the Free Templates