Cardboard City Skyline Collage

Make a cardboard city skyline collage! This is another fun art project for kids that can be made from from the cardboard in your recycling bin. We love crafting with cardboard because we always have boxes around. You can customize this project with the materials you have on hand!

I really love how these city skyline collages turned out. Kids will have fun designing their own skylines, and each one will be out unique! This would be a fun project to do with a class.

Supplies Needed:

• Cardboard – it’s helpful to have both corrugated cardboard and cereal box cardboard
• White paper plates – we used these for some of the windows
• Paint – we used acrylic
• Paintbrushes
• Scissors
• Glue – we used Elmer’s Glue All
• Paint pens – optional, these are useful for outlining windows

Step 1: Cut out your buildings and windows from cardboard. Lay everything out before you do any painting or gluing.

We used the fronts and backs from large cereal boxes as the base for our cities.

Step 2: Paint all the components before gluing your collage together. Paint your background as well. You can make blue sky, or paint the background black for a nighttime scene.

It’s especially helpful to paint the windows before gluing them down. There’s no way to do this neatly once they are glued on!

Step 3: Then glue all the buildings in place! We used Elmer’s Glue All. It’s a little stronger than normal Elmer’s glue. I actually used hot glue on one of the collages because it’s my FAVORITE, haha. Another good option is Tacky Glue.

Then display your completed city skyline collages!

Encourage kids to use a variety of colors for the buildings, and vary the heights and shapes of the buildings.

The city below has one building with painted windows. You can outline the windows with a paint pen.

Need more cardboard craft ideas?

Use cardboard, buttons, foil, and other materials from around the house to make these fun Cardboard Robot Collages.

Turn a cardboard box into a Magnetic Pac-Man Game.

Make Cardboard Spinning Tops out of cardboard and a marble.

Have fun crafting!