Construction Paper Cityscape Art Project

Construction paper in multiple colors — grays, browns, reds, and blues for buildings

Safety scissors

Glue stick

Large background paper — dark blue or black for a nighttime skyline, light blue for daytime

Cut rectangles of various heights and widths from different colors of construction paper. These are your buildings. Tall and thin, short and wide, all shapes welcome.

Arrange the rectangles along the bottom edge of a large background sheet. Overlap them slightly for a sense of depth — buildings in a real city overlap too.

Glue buildings in place from back to front. Put the tallest buildings down first, then layer shorter ones in front. This creates realistic depth.

Cut small yellow squares for lit windows and glue them in neat rows on each building. This is surprisingly satisfying.

Add details — a door at the bottom of each building, rooftop water towers made from small rectangles, antennae from thin strips, a clock tower, a flag.

Add sky elements — a half-circle sun or crescent moon, cloud shapes, stars made from small paper triangles.

Display the finished cityscape and talk about the buildings. "Which one is the tallest? Where would you want to live?"

Pre-cut the building rectangles for younger children and let them focus on arranging and gluing. Older kids can handle all the cutting themselves.

A dark background with yellow window squares creates a striking nighttime skyline effect.

This teaches layering and depth — concepts from real art composition. Back-to-front layering is how painters create the illusion of distance.

Add tiny cars or trees along the bottom for a street-level view.

If your child loves this, revisit it with different scenes — a farm with barns, an underwater city, or a space station.