Make Puffy Paper Bag Ice Cream Cone Sculptures With Kids

To make your own stuffed paper bag ice cream sculpture art you’ll need:

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How to Make Our Stuffed Paper Bag Ice Cream Cone Kids Craft – DIY Instructions:

Art Techniques to Try on Your Paper Bag Ice Cream Crafts

• A technique called sgraffito was used to scratch lines into the cake cone while the paint was still wet (visit our coffee-painted bison art for another example of sgraffito in action).
• Scrape painting is an incredibly fun process and a wonderful way to blend lots of colors. You can see the cool effect it creates on the orange popsicle soft sculpture (it mimics the texture of ice cream so well!) and see it used in another way on our mini scrape-painted surfboards.
• The lines of the waffle cone aren’t painted – they’re actually stamped, using the long edge of a piece of corrugated cardboard. You can use stamps of all kinds to add texture and color to your own ice cream cone sculptures.
• An incredible discovery: painted pasta looks JUST like sprinkles! You can experiment with different sizes and shapes of pasta or see what similar painted items look like (dry beans, dyed rice, etc.) Scrap paper and stickers are more sprinkle stand-in favorites.
• Get your Jackson Pollack style on with some splatters of paint, or once finished, drip paint over the top for a cone drizzled with hot fudge, caramel, melted marshmallow, or other imaginative toppings.

More Ice Cream Sculpture and Art Inspiration From Contemporary Artists

Here’s a cool scoop: there are TONS of places to find great inspiration for your kids’ ice cream art. Turns out, contemporary artists love ice cream as much as we do – from dreamy pastel paintings of whimsical sundaes to modern sculptures shaped like toppled soft serve cones, they’re serving up inspiration in the most delightful way.

These sweet masterpieces are perfect for sparking the imaginations of our kiddos. Next time your little ones are cooling off with a cone, encourage them to think about how they could recreate it…

Andy Warhol’s Ice Cream Dessert Series

Fun fact: Andy Warhol had a major sweet tooth! His Ice Cream Dessert series (early works from the 50s) are pure fun and a colorful joyful celebration of everyone’s favorite summer treat.

Taking inspiration from these stylized cones, kids can use stencils or stamps for their paper bag ice cream cone sculptures or to create their own pop art ice cream cones on paper bags or cardboard. They can also play with different color schemes, just like Warhol, emphasizing fun bright and contrasting colors.

Wayne Thiebaud’s Jolly Cones

You might recognize artist Wayne Thiebaud’s work from the imagery of cakes, pies, and other sweet treats he showcases in his work. These two Jolly Cones are a great example of the painterly pop art style he made his own with the help of impasto (a technique that uses thick layers of paint to create texture).

Using Thiebaud’s cones as a model, kids can practice drawing from a unique perspective, experiment with shadows, and try impasto for themselves.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone ice cream sculpture

The fun, larger-than-life Dropped Cone ice cream sculpture takes the whimsy all the way to ten, then turns it up a notch! It’s a great reminder to look at our subject matter from ALL different angles and consider the many different ways it can be presented.

Viewing this work provides a fantastic invitation for kids to make their own large-scale sculptures with materials available at home or in the classroom. Large brown paper leaf bags can be used to form a giant ice cream cone, or you can make tabletop-sized papier-mâché dropped cone sculptures.

Ed Bing Lee’s knotted fiber ice cream sculptures

Lee’s fiber ice cream sculptures, created from knotted and woven fibers, reinterpret ice cream as soft, tactile, three-dimensional objects.

Using materials like yarn, string, or colored shoelaces, kids can arrange, knot, or weave their own two or three-dimensional fiber ice cream art. Or they could create colorful macrame wall hangings in the shape of an ice cream cone.

Tim Berg and Rebekah Meyers’ Enjoy It While It Lasts

The glossy piece Enjoy It While It Lasts consists of four bold and bright large-scale popsicle sculptures in different stages of being consumed.

For a kid spin on this project, use playdough or clay to make a similar series – what does the cone or popsicle look like before a bite, after a bite, or melted? Is there anything left over after the cone or popsicle is gone?

You can also invite little ones to create their own disappearing ice cream cones with sidewalk chalk. Like the real thing, it’s here one minute and gone the next!

Sherman Kelly’s Ice Cream Scoop

While this isn’t a piece of art in the traditional sense, the ice cream scoop designed by Sherman Kelly had a profound impact on the ice cream industry and is an excellent example of industrial design art that significantly influenced our interaction with the everyday object — ice cream.

As a huge fan of functional art myself, I love finding opportunities for kids to dig into their imaginations and turn everyday objects and situations into playful art and design ideas.

For an incredibly fun project, invite kids to design their OWN ice cream scoops. How could they improve upon the now standard design? Maybe it’s a scoop that can serve two scoops at once, a glow-in-dark scoop for midnight snacks, or a flying scoop that delivers the ice cream right to your mouth. All the rules are out the door for these design creations! Bonus points for functional scoops!