As the Catholic faith is spread far and wide around the globe, our Saints, holy heroes, and even Our Lady comes in all different shades and colors! When doing a craft with kids that involves bible characters, Saints, or even a self portrait project, it is important to have supplies available for them in any skin tone they might be looking for. You can find all of my art supply guides here. We are going to take a look today at some good multicultural arts and crafts supplies for kids that you may want to have available for them at home or in the classroom.
Why You NEED Multicultural Art Supplies For Kids
I can remember drawing a picture of my family in kindergarten and having only a standard issue box of Crayola markers. Yellow? Orange?…. I went with orange. And it really seemed to ruin my picture.
As an artist, I have a giant awesome marker set (you can read other art supply guides here) and my kids come to me at least a few times a week to ask to borrow various skin tones.
Know why? Because kids are always drawing people, and their standard art supplies don’t come with the supplies they need to color those people. Think about that for a minute- the ratio of kid art that you see that includes people, and the number of skin tones that come in kid art supplies. Because the ratio is seriously off.
I’m here to tell you today that it is worth boosting your kid’s skin tone supplies and their ability to draw, color, paint, and paste beautiful skin tones of all shades!
So let’s take a look at what I think is worth having, and what I don’t.
Kid Markers In Different Skin Tones
As far as kid markers go, you can’t beat this pack of Crayola skin tone markers! I’m going to go ahead and say that I believe markers are the most important supply to purchase here for 2 reasons:
- standard marker packs don’t come with a variety of skin tones
- you can’t mix markers, so you’re stuck with whatever they give you
Here are the samples of how these markers colored in person, next to my arm which… I am very white and I don’t tan I just freckle. I think this box had a VERY GOOD variety of tones! Love it!
If you’re interested in how the different lines of Crayola markers color, definitely check out my Crayola marker comparison guide.
Construction Paper In Various Skin Tones
I am also going to rate this one as super important to have on hand! For any cut and paste activity involving people, it’s going to be important to have various papers on hand.
I have run into a lot of problems with this when making our Saint paper bag puppets. The standard construction paper packs just have bright colors with maybe a black white and brown mixed in, and it’s not diverse enough for kids to have choices. Again… you can’t mix the colors of paper- you get what you get. So I am rating this as the number 2 most important multicultural supply to have for your kids.
I got this pack of multicultural construction paper here. I am very excited to dig into this with my kids!
Multicultural Crayons For Kids
If your kids do a lot of coloring with crayons, this is also a must have multicultural craft supply! You can find this box of Crayola multicultural crayons here.
Here is the sample page of how the crayons colored. I really do think this is a very good set for kids! It also came with a straight up black and white crayon, which I didn’t bother sampling. But it’s always nice to have an extra black crayon. The white ones are borderline useless but whatever.
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More Multicultural Drawing Supplies
Only buy supplies that your kids use on a normal basis. So if your kids us a lot of colored pencils, get a pack of those. If your family loves oil pastels (and ours does!) then you may want to invest in a set of those. But if your kids never use oil pastels, you don’t need just the multicultural set. You get the idea.
- colored pencil set from Crayola
- oil pastel set
- water color pack
- water color pencils
- Classroom packs: big marker set for classrooms, and a big crayon set for classrooms
Multicultural Paints For Kids
Here is a multicultral pack of tempera paint– I actually recommend to go to your local craft store or Wal-Mart and grab the shades you need. You will definitely save money doing that.
Also, paint lends itself to being able to add a little white or add a little brown and manipulate the shade yourself, which is nice.
Multicultural Alcohol Based Markers
I am a HUGE fan of alcohol based markers. Although they are pricy, I find them worth the investment. You can read my reviews here of alcohol markers.
Usually I use Prismacolor markers, but their dedicated character drawing set comes with eye colors as well, and the result is a big pack that is quite pricy. For that reason I opted for the copic set of skin tone markers. This is a good set but it did seem heavy on the light skin tones and didn’t come with the range I was hoping for.
I am an extremely pale person and you can see in the picture below that several of these colors are lighter than me, leaving only 2 darker skin tone colors. It’s definitely better than nothing but it does seem limiting.
- here is a cheaper set of alcolhol skin tone markers, but I have never tried this brand personally
More Multicultural Resources For Kids
Picture books for christian kids about racism and diversity
Jesus loves the little children crafts, activities, and alternative lyrics
Crafts For Using Your New Supplies
