DIY Art Color Birthday Party!

This art-themed birthday party is bursting with color! Check out the colorful details from our art color party including the games, decorations, rainbow foods and party favors created for the party.

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Hello Crafty Friends! A few weeks ago we celebrated our little children’s birthdays with a colorful art party. When I asked my son what kind of party we should have, he told me “one with every color of the rainbow!” and his sister agreed. I took his suggestion and ran with it combining ideas I saw online for rainbow and art-themed parties. I love crafting for our parties so I added in a bunch of fun DIY projects. The outcome was lots of fun and lots of color!

Planning these little parties is really a lot of fun for me. Since I homeschool for preschool I try to involve the kids when I can. I worked the party theme into our weekly craft activities and they helped me create some of the decorations. We were studying “Food” for our homeschool preschool theme at the time so they helped me pick out fruits and vegetables for every color of the rainbow. I made fun shopping lists for the party food and they helped me shop and check things off. They really enjoyed helping and getting excited for the party!

Below are pictures from our party along with links to the DIY craft projects and resources. I hope you enjoy!

The Invitation

Every party starts with the invitation! For this party I created the invite myself in Photoshop using paint stroke images from Freepik and the fonts Supernova and Coolhand Luke.

The Food Table

The food table, like at most of our parties, was the focal point. I find it easier to focus my attention on one area of the party instead of trying to decorate the entire thing. It’s much more realistic for both my time and the budget I set aside for parties. For this food table, I made one of my giant paper crayons that I had previously made for our craft area, and replaced the word CREATE with CELEBRATE. I attached rainbow streamers from the back of it so they hung down creating a great display behind the table. Rainbow balloons were added on either side of the streamer wall to fill up the extra space.

We filled our food table with all sorts of yummy rainbow-themed foods. We had rainbow fruit, rainbow veggies and more! For our rainbow-themed fruit tray we used strawberries, melon, pineapple, kiwi, blueberries and purple grapes.

Our veggie tray, was designed to look like a color wheel and we were so excited to find purple cauliflower at our grocery store! Our alternative was going to be a purple onion, but this was so much better! I made a Creamy Italian Vegetable Dip to go with the veggies using a great recipe by Six Sisters Stuff. The veggies we used were radishes, red peppers, carrots, yellow peppers, green peppers, cucumbers, broccoli and purple cauliflower. You’ll notice the green section is way larger than the others, but I wanted to include the veggies I knew were our guests’ favorites!

Taco trays are always a huge hit at our parties. I’ve made this one a couple times before and there is never any left over. I used a Taco Dip Recipe from AllRecipes. The taco tray was colorful and we added colorful tortilla chips to go with it!

The cheese tray was a lot of fun! To add a little color to the tray, I made little cheese tags, with the name of each cheese, from colored paper and toothpicks and stuck them in cubes of cheese.

The Desserts

All of our desserts came from our local grocery store and they turned out so cute! In the past I have enjoyed trying to make desserts from ideas I found on Pinterest, but it’s been pretty hit or miss if they turn out. For this party I brought a few pictures to the grocery store bakery and they were happy to recreate them. They even made the giant cookie artist palette for me! It was my favorite part of the party!

Since this was joint Birthday party, we had two small cakes, one for each kid.

The cake toppers were made using thin wooden dowels, colorful washi tape and mini pom poms to top them off. I felt a little nutty making these the night before, but they turned out so cute! Since we were getting such tiny cakes, they helped add height! I created the paper number toppers using my Cricut :)

The rest of the food table was decorated with a paper circle banner, colorful paper pinsheels I made and lots of cute cupcakes. On a small table next to the foot table we had paper plates and napkins set up.

Other Decorations

I didn’t end up getting a picture of the whole party but there were four small tables and we covered each one with a different color plastic tablecloth and placed matching balloons at the table. You can see our red table below; it had a red tablecloth, red tin with red tissue paper that was holding the weights for the red balloons floating above it.

*Update: Since this party, I have created a free printable rainbow birthday banner and rainbow yarn wreath that would have been perfect for our art color birthday party! I wanted to share them both in this post in case you find them helpful for your color-themed parties!

Rainbow Party Games

No party is complete without games! We played several cute party games including musical chairs which we played to a playlist my husband with songs that all referenced color. Songs like “Purple Rain”, “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Yellow Submarine”. We also played pass the beach ball (like hot potato, but with a colorful inflatable beach ball) and we played the Rainbow Bingo game I created. Fruit loops were used to mark our boards – colorful and taste safe for little ones!

We had game prizes like coloring books (both adult and kid) and colorful candy in a large basket that the winners could choose from. There were also little empty gift bags that the winner could use to pick out one of the mini canvases the kids created that had been placed around the room. The kids made about 8 of these little mini canvases and they were displayed at the tables along with balloons. The grandparents all made mad dashes for these when they won a game. We made these before the party, but they would have also been a great activity at the party!

Party Favors

One of my favorite DIY projects for our party were the Colored Pencil Twizzlers Treat Boxes I created for party favors. Each box was filled with rainbow Twizzlers and they were all set in a basket for everyone to take on their way out. I filled the boxes right before the party so the Twizzlers wouldn’t harden, but if I were to do this again I would probably place each box in a clear food bag tied with colorful ribbon. This would make the Twizzlers last even longer before getting hard, in case guests don’t eat the treat the same day as the party.

Art Party Style

I love creating special party clothes for the kids to wear at their birthday parties. This year I made my daughter a colorful tutu dress using Anne Kelle’s Rainbow Remix fabric. For my son I created a T-shirt using my Cricut and iron-on vinyl. You can check out the tutorial and free pattern and make your own Color Outside the Lines T-shirt!

We gave our kiddos art smocks as birthday gifts and they really loved them! They were made using fabric printed with their own artwork through a company called Contrado. I used the oliver + s art smock pattern and am so pleased with how they turned out! You can read more about the process of making these art smocks!

Our art party was so fun and both our kids and all of our guests had a great time! It was a great gender-neutral party theme both my kids were excited about. This theme was also general enough that I had a lot of the supplies already on hand and anything I purchased was easy to find and affordable. The giant crayon is now hanging in the kids’ craft area with new letters that say “Create” :)

DIY Craft Projects from our Art Color Party

Resources

Colorful paper plates and napkins – Target. These sets are really close on Amazon:
- Colorful Rainbow Party Supplies
- Rainbow Party Pack for 30
Plastic Rainbow Ring Cupcake Toppers
Rainbow Cupcake Wrappers
Rainbow Streamers – Party City. But these rainbow streamers look fun!
Rainbow balloons – Party City
Mini Canvas and Easel
Desserts – Our local grocery store
Red and white cake stands – Target Dollar Spot
Color Song Suggestions
Images for Invitations (handmade in Photoshop) – Freepik