Watered Color: Painting with Rain Art Project

Rainy Days are good days to stay indoors and do art projects with the kids. Have you ever considered harnessing the weather to make a rain painting? That’s just what we did one afternoon when my kids and I decided it was time to give new meaning to the word “watercolors.”

First we used some watercolor pencils Kiddo received as a gift. If you don’t already have some, I love these watercolor pencils from Staedtler, (affiliate link) but any brand will do.

He drew this: (I love the zig-zaggy lines!)

Instead of using a brush dipped in water to spread the colors, as you would normally do, we put it out on our fire escape (sorry, no yard!)  in the rain. I think I left it out a little bit too long, it had pools of water on it and took a VERY long time to dry. So my recommendation is to keep an eye on it and bring it back indoors when you think it’s “finished”.

Next Kiddo wanted to use his watercolor palette. Honestly, I hate the watercolor palette. Kiddo is more interested in playing with the brush on the palette than putting paint on paper. And the palette ends up looking like this:

He did create this (I am enamored of the autumnal color scheme) which he also wanted to put out in the rain.

I found a spot on the fire escape that was just a bit drippy (not getting the full force of the rain) so the colors didn’t all run into one big brown puddle. I like the effect. It would be fun to do this in a directed way to mix colors like red and blue to see what purples develop, etc.

Next, Kiddo wanted to do something a bit different so we moved away from the rain painting, though we stuck with our “water colors” theme. We got out our liquid watercolors and did some resist painting, first with a wax crayon and then colored crayons. We discovered washable crayons don’t work well for this, so be sure to use regular crayons. Next time I would like to try oil pastels.

After drawing with the crayons, he painted over it with the water colors. He also took the spray bottle to the paintings and sprinkled on some chunky salt.

The salt absorbs some of the water and creates an interesting effect.

I was impressed at how long he was interested in doing art today. That doesn’t happen very often.

Want Your Kids to Love Being Unplugged?

Subscribe to our newsletter and as a thank you, receive 10 waiting games kids can play anytime anywhere.

Your email will *never* be shared or sold to a 3rd party. Click here to view our privacy policy.