Halloween Monster Shirt Activity for Kids

I am already working on getting my kids into the Halloween spirit by creating spooky activities they can join in on!

Our latest adventure is creating our very home handmade finger painted monster shirts. This is a great activity for toddlers or older kids as well. I had to add some final touches to each monster tee, but older kids could have a blast adding their own monster face, however my 1-year-old and 2-year-old are not quite ready to paint with such detail.

I love this activity too, because now my boys have a little keepsake from their toddler years that we could dress a stuffed animal in or make small pillow from once they grow out of it. It’s kinda like a never ended craft in that regard…

This is a rather inexpensive craft if you already have the supplies, you’ll just need to pick up some new shirts to paint on! Keep reading for more monster shirt activity inspiration:

For this project you will need:

plain tee shirt
tape
scissors
large plastic bag
fabric/acrylic paint (acrylic paint dries stiff)
cardboard

My dad helped my sons and I with this project (shout out to my super rad dad!), and I definitely recommend a helper if you’re creating with multiple small children. Since I was creating with little tiny tots, my dad had the great idea to pull the shirts over some bent cardboard to keep them firm and easy for small fingers to paint on.

Next, you will need to cut a square from your large plastic freezer bag to adhere to the shirt to make this project “mess free”.

Secure the plastic with tape. Depending on how aggressive your little Picasso is, you may need a heavy duty tape, however we found that Gorilla Tape was very hard to remove and left a sticky residue behind (learn from our mistakes! haha). We would have been fine with packing tape on each shirt for the kids since they’re gentle painters (for now…).

Before completely securing all four sides, be sure to add several dollops of paint to let your little one explore with.

Now you’re ready to create a creeeeepy monster!!!

Remove the tape and plastic slowly as to not smudge your child’s monster masterpiece (if you want, you could even take the piece of plastic and make a transfer of your child’s design on paper or another piece of fabric for a keepsake).

My oldest son wasn’t fully vibing on arts and crafts time since there were Hotwheels to be played with…

so we got creative and let him drive his cars on the shirt to make his work of art. You could have fun with this by using small pumpkins to roll over the shirt, or other entertaining objects that will not fully puncture the plastic.

After Felix completed his cars treacherous journey into monster paint land, his shirt ended up looking a bit like the wolf man.

After the paint dried for a day, I went back to add the monster faces using a black fabric puff paint pen (and as you can see Felix’s shirt got a little messy when I dropped my phone into the paint…what an ordeal…photos are hard!).