Okay I have a confession to make – I LOVE MY LAMINATOR !!!!  I truly do.  I have these laminating afternoons where I just sit and laminate a bunch of kids cards and pages for the coming weeks.  Naturally my kids always want to come and join in (same concept as when I make something to eat the kids suddenly become hungry for whatever it is that is on my plate).

Well this last weekend while I was trying to do my laminating and the kids where crowding around wanting to join in we stumbled upon a fun art idea.  Laminating sleeves are great for tracing and colouring on and they look amasing hanging up on the windows !!!  Why had we not done this sooner ???

We started off my tracing over some of the colouring pages that were lying on my table and then the kids used their Sharpies to colour them in.

With the first few I actually cut the laminating sleeves in half and the kids traced on the shiny side (the outside).

But then we thought it would be fun to laminate the pictures.  So the with the next few we opened up the laminating sleeves and traced the pictures on the inside and the kids coloured them in.  This also showed personal preference – my son likes doing it this way whereas my daughter definitely likes doing the tracing and colouring on the shiny outer side.

We also experimented using different pens.  The two sets of pens which gave us the best colour where the Sharpies and the Staedtler pens.

I personally think that if you do it the second way and laminate the sleeves it looks better hanging up on the window (my daughter naturally disagrees with me on this).

Different examples of window art using our laminating sleeves

In the pictures above I tried to show the different outcomes you get.  The butterfly and the flower scene on the left are from colouring in the pictures on the inside of the laminating sleeves and then actually laminating them.  The flower scene on the right and the snail is when my daughter just traces and colours onto a laminating sleeve on the shiny outside and does not laminate it.

window art using laminating sleeves

You could trace over any picture or you could just let the kids draw their own pictures.  The links for the colouring pictures that my kids used are listed below.

The butterfly and the bee pictures are actually from the Minibeast colour by addition and subtraction pages that my daughter was doing yesterday – it is platinum on Twinkl

The train picture is part of the FREE modern transport colouring pages on Twinkl

The snail is from the FREE detailed Minibeast coluring pages on Twinkl

The flower scene is also FREE from Twinkl it is part of the flowers colouring sheet   (we have used these pages for lots of art activities).