Make colorful designs or beautiful spring flowers with bell pepper stamps in this fun painting activity. Kids will love mixing colors and being creative in this open-ended art process. 

This post contains affiliate links. Privacy and Disclosure

Kids can play with their food without wasting a single bite! This is a fun way for a portion commonly discarded in food prep to become a kids paint tool!

In this painting activity we use red, green and yellow peppers. Save the tops of the peppers you remove during meal preparation.

The stems of these peppers make great handles for kids to hold. This allows kids to easily stamp designs onto paper. 

Fun fact about bell peppers.

• A bell pepper is technically a fruit and not a veggie although, like the tomato, we often refer to it as a vegetable. The color progresses from green to yellow to orange to red the longer it remains on the stem.

This is a sturdy fruit, and suitable for a painting activity with toddlers and preschoolers.

Painting with fruits and veggies is fun any time of year, but it is especially meaningful to add to a spring theme or to a fall harvest unit with preschoolers. Exploring foods and how they are grown helps kids understand how the food they eat reaches the supermarket.

Related: Exploring Seeds in Foods We Eat

Painting with pepper stamps 

Use different colors of peppers and paints to add interest to the activity.

The peppers can be cut in different ways to provide a variety of stamp options.

Slice a top portion off each pepper. Remove the seeds. (Save the seeds for other activities!)

There are two ways to make pepper stamps as shown in the image above.

• Leave the stem and pepper top intact like the red pepper, to use as a large round stamp.

• Remove the stem completely like the yellow pepper, to make a smaller stamp.

How to paint flowers with pepper stamps

1. Cut notches in the red pepper stamp to make flower petals.

2. Dip the red pepper in red paint and stamp onto the paper.

3. Dip the smaller pepper stamp in yellow paint to make the pollen in the center of the flower.

4. Dip the yellow pepper in green paint and make a long swipe to create the stem of the flower.

Learning through play

• Mix two or more colors using the yellow pepper stamp.
• Observe the different sizes, shapes and colors of the stamps.
• Talk about colors and shapes in the pictures.

More ways to use discarded or leftover food as paint stamps.

• Shapes cut from a pumpkin can be used in an art activity. 
• Artsy Craftsy Mom creates flowers with okra and french beans.
• Crafty Morning shows how to paint with celery stalks.

  More stamping activities!

Stamping with pumpkin pieces