Mermaid Heart Craft for Valentine’s Day
Do you have a little mermaid in your house? Today we’re bringing you the perfect craft to do with her in preparation for Valentine’s Day! This mermaid heart inspired valentine is simple and fun to make (even for really young kids)! It is a great DIY option if your child would like to create homemade valentines to distribute to friends this year. There are also a ton of ways that you can take this basic tutorial and put your own unique spin on it! We hope you enjoy making this Mermaid Heart Craft this Valentine’s Day!
What You’ll Need
One thing I love about this Mermaid Heart Craft is that it is super simple and doesn’t require a lot of complicated materials! You probably already have everything you need to make it at home! You’ll need the following:
1. Colored craft paper
2. White or off white art paper
3. Pencil
4. Scissors
5. Craft glue or a glue stick
Optional: While it’s not necessary, you may want to add glitter, sequins, or additional “bling” to the scales on your Mermaid Heart.
How to Make It:
The first step in getting started with this Mermaid Heart craft is for your child to pick out the colors that will make up the scales. The Mermaid Heart Craft in the photos below uses traditional Valentine’s Day colors: shades of red, pink, and purple. However, feel free to choose whatever colors (and whatever number of colors) you want, whether that means picking out your child’s favorite colors, the favorite colors of the recipient, or just whatever your child deems to be the most “mermaid-y” colors!
On one of the pieces of colored paper, carefully draw a small circle. You may want to trace around a small circular household object to make it easier! This circle should be the size that you’d like for the scales for this craft to be. You will use it as a template to trace the rest of the circles from your colored paper. The size of both the heart and scales for this craft can vary, depending on how big you want your final product to be. (Just keep that in mind when you decide how big to make your circular scale pattern.) After you’ve traced plenty of circles in a variety of colors, go ahead and carefully cut them out.
Next, choose a square of paper for the background. The size of the paper will determine the size of the heart. You can choose regular white paper (as shown), a colored piece of paper, or even a fun, shiny piece of foil paper (like this). The choice is yours!
Now you can start to glue the circle shapes along the bottom of the square paper. Glue the circles side by side. If you are doing this craft with a young child who can’t safely cut the circles out, this is a good time to let him or her grab a glue stick and participate! This is a good fine motor skill activity for little hands.
Once the first line of circles is glued down, grab more scales/circles of a different color and create a second row. You’ll want to place this line of circles so that each circle on the second row overlaps where two circles on the bottom row meet, as shown. This creates the “scale effect!”
Now you just keep going! Continue to glue the circles and to fill the layers until the square paper is filled with a variety of different-colored circles. You may want to alternate the colors you use within each row, or simply switch to a new color every time you start a new row. It’ll look good, either way!
Once your page is full of colorful circles, grab another piece of paper to match whatever kind of paper you chose to glue the circles onto (for example, our circles are glued onto a piece of plain white paper, so we just grabbed another piece of same-sized white paper). On this second piece of paper, trace a large heart and then carefully cut out the heart from the paper while keeping the rest of the paper intact.
Then simply glue the paper with the heart cut-out over the piece of paper that is covered in colorful scales, as shown.
To finish up your Mermaid Heart Craft, simply trim up any scales that are peeking over the edges!
If your child wants to add any additional details (like glitter or sequins) now is a great time to do that. Otherwise, your Mermaid Heart Craft is complete and ready to display or give to a loved one. Happy Valentine’s Day!
You May Also Like:
If you are looking for more fun, Valentine’s Day-themed crafts, you may also like these!
Adorable Pom Pom Love Bugs Cute Woodland Animal Valentine for Girls and Boys
Huge List for Valentine’s Day Activities