When the sky’s grey, print these instant colorful skies on paper!

Colors of the sky in ever changing gradient hues make such a feast for the eyes.

I was recently collecting a few things for kids under the theme of changing weather for a blog post and it seemed that the colors of the sky make a great creative theme for kids.

When the sky makes spectacular gradations from deep blues to rainbow pastel colors, it compels anyone to take the opportunity to photograph it. I remember trying to capture the amazing colors the eye can see and always find out they come out in murky grainy nothing. Photographer Eric Cahan has a great skill to capture them in a series of photos of the sky that carry a large pastel range of the tones you can observe through different times. They also make perfect screen savers and today I even noticed a couple of choices on the new iPhone backgrounds!

So, I’ve made some printable gradient papers in 5 different sets of colors you can print and use for all sorts of paper crafts and art projects for kids. They will make simple but colorful gift wraps, nice envelopes or favor bags for rainbow themed parties.

Also I believe these pastel colors don’t consume much ink. When I printed them onto plain papers on normal settings it was super quick and still looked very good.

They were fun to photograph and I’m trying to learn to take better photos so I just messed around a little. However it seems to have some kind of moire in the image. I haven’t got much clue about photography, still lots to learn…

I tried wrapping some boxes as my first quick use for these papers and although it’s a little unimaginative a use for this article considering the possibilities, they looked very nice and I’m sure to use them often for gifts! If you want to use more than 1 sheet for larger gifts, print the second sheet with the ‘mirrored’ (or reversed) setting from your printer, then you can seamlessly connect two sheets for continuing gradation. Of course you can connect many sheets the same way if you like.

There can be many interesting art projects for kids to do with these simple papers along with weather & nature themed activities which we’re yet to try.  I’ve just made pretty pastel colored ones but to express more mood and atmosphere there can be many more shades that might be useful.