DIY Cardboard Boxes Activities for Kids

On April 22^nd of every year, the world celebrates Earth Day. Thousands of events are held throughout the world in support of protecting the environment. An easy way to celebrate at home with your kids is to make arts-and-crafts projects using reusable or recyclable material such as cardboard boxes. Below are five creative ways to use cardboard boxes as a craft medium.

1. Mailbox – Play postman/post office with a neat cardboard mailbox. Your kids can send letters, cards, and packages to other family members in the household.

2.  Puppet Stage – Use two large cardboard boxes to make a puppet stage. Children can decorate the outside of the boxes using markers or waterproof paint. Then use some fabric to create the curtains for the stage.

 3. Build a store – Whether it is a donut shop, candy shop, or convenient store, you can use a couple of large cardboard boxed to build a “play” store for your kids. Cut out some windows to display the items for sale and if the box is large enough, you can even cut out a door.

4. Build a castle – Using cardboard boxes and four inner tubes from paper towel roles, your kids can create an elegant castle with all the frills and accessories of a real castle.

5. Make a guitar – Grab some corrugated cardboard boxes, a wooden dowel, and a few rubber bands to create this unique cardboard guitar for your kids. 

Pop Art: Bubble Wrap Paintings

Artist, Bradley Hart, takes creativity to a whole new level with his unique paintings that incorporates bubble wrap as a canvas. Hart, who lives in Toronto but works in New York City, creates portraits of celebrities by tediously injection acrylic paint into bubble wrap, thus creating a unique pixelated effect. On average, each painting takes about 150 hours. Hart admits that the process of injecting each bubble with paint is a daunting task – injecting too quickly could destroy the bubble while injecting too slow does not fill the bubble completely. It takes him two to three days just to load the paint into the 1200-1500 syringes that is needed to make one portrait.

Perhaps one of Hart’s most popular bubble wrap portrait is of the late Steve Jobs. Hart injected over 16,000 bubbles using 89 different colors of paint to create this one-of-a-kind portrait. Bradley Hart’s collection called “Injections” can be seen in person at Gallery Nine5 in New York.