Go on a Painting Picnic

Last week I packed up a bag of art supplies and we went on a painting picnic. We came down to the Barrie waterfront to draw the Spirit Catcher statue that is our city icon. Since it was a breezy day the blades on the Spirit Catcher were moving which was pretty cool to see and made for great inspiration.

For our trip I packed up a few pads of paper, some watercolour paper, watercolour disk paints, some watercolour pencil crayons, regular pencil crayons, a small container for water, paint brushes, pencils and easer; and I also packed a blanket, water and some snacks.

To help the kids get started, I suggested they use a pencil lightly to get the outline of what they wanted to draw and their spacing on the paper before they added colour. Then they moved on to the water colour pencils. If you haven’t worked with them before, they draw like pencil crayons but you can take a wet paint brush to the drawing and it bleeds like paint. It creates a soft look, you can add more on top once it’s dry or add dark lines when it’s still wet. Then we layered regular watercolour paint on top to get richer colours.

Lilo worked really hard on her painting, taking her time to get all the details. Isla did her’s quicker and then did a second of the lake with a duck and boat. I also did 2 paintings.
We had a really fun day, going out and capturing nature. We saw so many fun things and got the kids looking at the world differently and enjoying the beauty in our city - the sea gull that came to see if we had a yummy snack for him, the baby duck swimming with his mom and the paddle boat we saw floating by. The kids really enjoyed it that I’m going to make a small travelling art kit for us to take more often.

Next time you go on a walk with your kids maybe bring a drawing pad and some paints, or just even some crayons for them to capture what they see.