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Artist and Masterpiece Sibling Costumes

I am lazy. I don’t sew and I refuse to spend $30 on a child’s costume that is ugly and will fall apart. My 4 year old daughter kept changing her mind about her costume from ghost to kitty to my personal favorite, “I just want to be a regular little girl”. My daughter loves, loves, LOVES to draw and paint and so I suggested that she be an artist. She loved the idea. She loved the idea even more when I said that her little brother could be her work of art and that she could (pretend to) paint him. So simple and easy!

The costume was a huge hit! We got a lot of compliments on how cute and creative the concept was. It was mostly laziness rather than creativity, but hey, I’ll take it!

ARTIST/PAINTER COSTUME
-Art Smock / Art Apron / Old button down shirt
-Beret
-Artist’s Palette
-Paint Brush
-Paint smudges on face and smock
-Pencil mustache (optional)

My daughter already had this art smock from Ikea. I wanted to have paint splatters all over her, but that smock wipes up so nicely that nothing will really dry on it 😦 I found the beret on Amazon and I had a Swagbucks giftcard, so it was free! I got the artist’s palette and paint brushes at Michael’s. We have paintbrushes at home but I wanted something a little bigger. There was a less expensive plain white palette but I let Adaline choose which one to get. She chose the watercolor palette which was fine because she would definitely use the watercolors and now I didn’t have to add paint to the white palette for her costume.
If you don’t have an art smock you can use an old white button down shirt as a smock. Be sure to smear it with lots of paint…artists are never clean! If you don’t have a palette and don’t want to buy one you can always make one by cutting the shape into cardboard or cardstock and coloring in the paint. That was more work than I wanted to do (remember the keyword today is “lazy“), so the $4 I spent on the palette was worth it to me.
I also think it would be cute to draw a curly mustache on your artist, but my daughter was having none of that!

MASTERPIECE/WORK OF ART COSTUME
-Long-sleeved white shirt (a few sizes bigger)
-Painted Canvas
-Picture Frame (optional)
-Hot Glue Gun (to glue the canvas to the shirt)

My original idea for the masterpiece was to use larger canvases and have my son wear them hanging over his shoulders sandwich board style. He’s 20 months old and falls over for no reason at all sometimes, so when I saw the smaller 9×12 canvas panels I got the idea to hot glue it directly to his shirt instead. I also thought it would be really cute to glue a frame from the dollar store around the canvas, but I didn’t think that sounded too comfortable or safe for my little boy. Instead I just added the little sign that said “Masterpiece” so that I didn’t have to keep explaining the costume to people. It worked brilliantly and we got a lot of compliments 🙂

It’s important to note that I got my son’s shirt a little larger (he wears 18-24m and this shirt is a 3T) because you need the extra room once the canvas is glued to the shirt. If the shirt were any smaller I wouldn’t have been able to fit it over his head.

The canvas panels I used were a set of 5 from Michael’s. You can get single canvases as well, but they didn’t have any at Michael’s and I knew that my daughter would use all of them.

Instead of using a canvas you could use card stock, card board, poster board, a pillowcase, just about anything that you can paint/draw on and then attach to or hang from a shirt. You can even just draw/paint directly onto the shirt itself. It doesn’t get any easier than that!

Adaline actually painted the canvas herself. After it dried I hot glued the canvas onto a long sleeved tee.