Artist Inspired Easter Eggs

Here’s a super fun way to decorate Easter eggs: create artist inspired Easter eggs. This idea came from the book, Henri, Egg Artiste by Marcus Pfister. Marcus Pfister is well known for his Rainbow Fish series. See how we painted our eggs and be inspired to make your own. I get commissions for purchases made through the affiliate links in this post.

Artist Inspired Easter Eggs to Go Along with Henri, Egg Artiste by Marcus Pfister - part of the Virtual Book Club for Kids

Henri, Egg Artiste by Marcus Pfister

In the book, Henri, Egg Artiste, Henri is a rabbit who paints eggs. The eggs are hidden on Easter for children to find. In the story, Henri is tired of painting eggs the same way as he always has. He wants to try something new. Henri finds inspiration from famous artists and paints his eggs in a similar style. Many of his painted eggs contain rabbits instead of people. The back of the book shows the original paintings so you can compare Henri’s eggs.

Artist Inspired Easter Eggs

We chose 3 artists featured in the book as inspirations. Then, we looked through some other artists’ paintings online. Aiden (age 4 at the time) found 3 more he liked, so we got to work painting eggs.

Materials Used:

  • paper mache eggs (ours came in a package of 6)
  • paint (we used both tempera paint and acrylic)
  • paint brushes
  • markers
  • cardboard roll (cut into pieces for eggs to stand on while painting and drying)
  • pipe cleaner (used as an egg stand)
paper mache egg

We placed our paper mache eggs on cardboard rolls to help us paint them. This also worked well for drying.

When looking at artists online, Aiden really liked van Gogh’s Starry Night. He wanted me to paint this egg. Originally, we were going to put on gold star stickers, but the stickers we had were too big. Aiden set out to work on the egg inspired by Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow. He chose red, orange, and yellow for his egg. Aiden decided to paint another egg completely orange. This egg received a splatter and drip painting technique inspired by Jackson Pollack. We did the splatter painting inside a box.

splatter painting

I painted the Monet inspired water lilies as well. Aiden chose that piece of art because of his soon to be born sister, Lily.

Artist Inspired Easter Eggs to Go Along with Henri, Egg Artiste by Marcus Pfister - part of the Virtual Book Club for Kids

From the book, Aiden also chose the Keith Haring inspired art. Henri painted colorful dancing bunnies on his egg. I drew one bunny on our egg. I painted the bunny red and outlined the bunny in white. Aiden finished painting the egg white. On the third egg, Aiden used markers to draw and color circles. This technique was inspired by Kandinsky’s Several Circles.

Here’s all six of our artist inspired Easter eggs.

No Time for Flash Cards created van Gogh inspired Easter eggs that are very pretty, too. Take a look.

Which artists would you choose to imitate?

More Easter Activities for Kids

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This post was originally published on March 10, 2014.

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