In looking to find simple, easy ways for my pre-schooler and toddler to work together on art, pointilism or dot art by The Artful Parent gave us a great start.

Paints, especially water colours are one of our favourite art media mainly because the colours are so rich, a little bit goes a long way, it offers a lot of great colour options and cleans fast. Q-tips or buds are fun as both my 4 and 1 year old could hold them easily and the strokes were strong and bold.

All that you need for this art activity are

• Paints holder – old ice cube tray, cups or little pots work well
• Q-tips or buds – 1 for each colour or you will have a mixed pallete in no time
• Water colours (or poster) – more than 3 colours is good for mixing and exploring
• Paper

Set up an ‘Invitation to Create’ for your child with these simple materials and watch them try, learn and discover the fun of creating art with dots. When he started playing with it, the elder one due to prior art conditioning was drawing lines and trying to paint with the q-tips so I picked up a paper too and drew a dot flower (that’s what I thought) and he quickly picked up on it.

His first observation was that I was drawing a snow flake which is what my flower really looked like. Then he proceeded to draw more dot patterns, a boat, and a maze creating some amazing art ideas.

We experimented with mixing colours which is easy with dots – primary and secondary colours can create colour illusions. While the boy explored, I did some dot art of my own and he was able to identify some of what I had done. The little one woke up while we were at it and wanted to try his hand at dot art too.

It was one of the most fun afternoons we had. We are certainly going to be doing more of this.

Here are some of the variations I will be trying – using black and white only, browns and greys, monochrome, only primary colours to see how these work for us.

Let me know how this goes for you.