Art Warm-up Activities [FREE Printables]

Add these FREE printable ART Warm-up Activities to your art lessons! Practice duplication, matching, & mirror imaging drawing skills!

I used Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes for my daughter’s first grade art lessons. The book suggests doing some specific art warm-up activities which allow for drawing skills practice in duplication, matching, and mirror imaging.

In order to make the activity a bit easier on myself, I created a printable version of the warm-ups and laminated them for re-use. And it’s a good thing I did! My daughter LOVED doing the art warm-up activities! I would have wasted so much paper had it not been for the laminated printables!

Helpful Hint #1: Don’t have a laminator? Slide the printables into page protectors.

Helpful Hint #2: I drew my images with a wet erase marker. However, my daughter completed the activities with a dry erase marker. This allowed her to erase her work without erasing mine.

There are three art activities in the printable file:

• Duplication Warm-up Activity
• Matching Warm-up Activity
• Mirror Imaging Warm-up Activity

Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes:

The art book we used for our first grade art lessons is below. This is where I learned about the art warm-up activities and was inspired to create the printables.

Drawing With Children by Mona Brookes

How to use the Duplication Warm-up:

Draw something different in the first box of each row. The child duplicates your drawing in the other three boxes.

Basically, the adult draws four different images in the boxes to the left of the dark, vertical line. The child has three attempts to copy the drawing in the three boxes to the right of each drawing.

How to use the Matching Warm-up:

For each row, draw the same thing in all the boxes with just a slight difference. However, the very first box in the row and one of the other boxes need to be exactly the same. The child then circles the drawing which is the exact same as the first one.

How to use the Mirror Imaging Warm-up:

There are six boxes with a dotted line down the middle of each of them. Draw something on one side of each of the dotted lines. Then, the child draws the mirror image on the other side.

This was by far my daughter’s favorite warm-up activity! She asked to do it over and over again! Check out the mirror imaging warm-up activity in action below. My drawings are in blue and hers are in red.

Art Activities for ALL Ages:

Since you are doing the drawing for the child to duplicate, mirror, and/or match, you can determine how challenging it is for the child! Therefore, you can use the art warm-up activities for any grade level art lesson!

Now that I’ve used these printables with all five of my children as part of our first-grade art lessons, I know they are a hit. I’m glad the book Drawing with Children was part of the My Father’s World First Grade homeschool curriculum. Want to add the art warm-up activities to your lesson plans?

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Download Instructions:

Ready to download the FREE Art Warm-up Activities? Click the button below to get access to the printable pdf file.

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This post was originally published on September 27, 2010.