Painting with Toy Cars Process Art

Painting with toy cars is a fun process art and sensory experience for kids. The car tyres make interesting patterns in the paint and kids can learn about colour mixing as the cars move from one colour to another. Whether you use large construction vehicles, small racing cars or even remote controlled cars kids are sure to love this car activity. For even more fun complete the activity by turning a large bowl of soapy water into a pretend car wash.

Related - Transportation activities for toddlers and preschoolers

Painting with Toy Cars Process Art Activity

You will need:

• Tuff Tray or a large piece of paper or cardboard
• Paint,
• Toy cars
• Cotton wool balls (optional)

Toy Car Painting

This activity is really simple to set up.  We chose to use the 3 primary colours for this activity as Harry is really interested in colour mixing at the moment.  He loves seeing what new colours he can create! 

To set up I squirted a blob of each colour onto our tuff tray. If you don't have a tuff tray a large piece of cardboard on the floor would be perfect. We decided to use 3 large construction vehicles and we put a vehicle next to each blob of paint. We also found some cotton wool to load onto the back of the trucks and to add texture.  

Harry rightly told me the vehicles wouldn't be able go without a driver so he added Spiderman! 

Harry started carefully dipping the car tyres in the paint and moving them slowly across the tuff tray, but before long he was whizzing them about and mixing the colours together. 

He created lots of painty patterns.

Harry loves using his imagination and before long the cotton wool balls had turned into blue snow and Spiderman got extra painty which turned him into a bad guy!

Just when Harry thought the fun was over I got a big bowl of bubbly water which we used as a car wash. 

Toy Car Wash 

He loved scrubbing and pouring water over the cars to make them nice and clean. 

Dipping cars in paint and using them to make painty marks is extra messy if you do it on a large scale like we did, but it can easily be scaled down to a table top activity by using smaller cars (as can be seen in the video).

We cant wait to do this activity again.  Would your child enjoy painting with cars? Why not try using smaller cars, pull back and go cars or remote controlled cars? 

Have some messy fun as you get painty with this fun painting with toy cars process art activity.