Online art games for kids fall into several categories from the most basic virtual coloring pages, sticker and stamp art, and makeover and fashion dress up, to more sophisticated painting, drawing, animation, and photo editing games.
Online Painting Games
At the award-winning JacksonPollock.org website, visitors use mouse movements and clicks to create unique splatter paintings. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) created influential abstract expressionist paintings. He worked with household paints rather than artists paints, used techniques such as pouring and dripping, worked on the floor rather than upright at an easel, and used paintbrushes as well as other tools.
Shidonni.com allows kids to draw a pet, along with background scenes, food, and dress-up clothing, all for use in online games and activities.
Brushter (NGA.gov), part of the NGA Kids Art Zone, provides users with a full palette of colors and a wide variety of brushes and tools with which to create artworks. The brush menus include hairy, barbed, soft, feathers and stars, stains and gravity, splatters and lines, boxes and lines, and calligraphy/slope. The tools include smudge, fragment, spread, blur, and ripple. Users can save and print finished works.
Online Coloring, Sticker, and Stamp Art Games
Faces and Places (NGA.gov) allows kids to recreate historic folk paintings, including portraits and landscapes. They choose backgrounds, characters, facial expressions and hairstyles, etc., to redecorate and reassemble, all the while gaining familiarity with classic styles and rural American life.
The NGA Kids Art Zone (National Gallery of Art) also provides games that allow children to work with still life paintings, play with a Dutch dollhouse, create an imaginary jungle, create a collage, use a motion painting machine, create and warp paintings, construct with cubes, and more.
KeaColoringBook.com gives kids an easy-to-use palette of colors and brushes to use on virtual coloring pages.
The fun activities at ColorWithLeo.com include a drawing pad, color mixing, coloring, a color memory game, drawing, a portraits game, and an animal game.
MrPicassoHead.com invites users to choose facial features to create Picasso-style drawings in the manner of a Mr. Potato Head toy. Additional options include resizing, flipping, rotating, moving objects forward and backward, and color.
Online Makeover and Dress Up Design Games
The following websites list online fashion-themed games.
Photo Editing Games
Photo Op (NGA.gov) allows kids to interact with a virtual digital camera with focus, aperture, zoom, and speed options. Kids take snapshots, learn about composition, lighting, focus, and shutter speed. After taking digital photos, kids move on to the photo editor and work with a variety of options.
Online art games offer simple to sophisticated tools for children to use to develop their computer, software, and creative art skills.
Sara McGrath - Sara is a veteran homeschool mom of three, Usborne consultant, and the author of Unschooling: A Lifestyle of Learning.
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