Summer is a great time to have fun with art and work on easier projects that don’t require many supplies. All the art ideas listed here can be done with kids or grand-kids and can be finished in one hour or so on watercolor or cardboard postcards sized paper.
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Ideal for pattern drawing and meditative art, these affordable, pre-cut artist tiles by Strathmore help make the process of combining repetitive marks, circles, lines, and forms both fun and easy to learn. – 300 Series Bristol Artist Tiles.
Strathmore’s 400 Series Mixed Media is a heavyweight, 140 lb paper that combines the attributes of a watercolor paper with a vellum drawing finish. Ideal for wet and dry media, these cards accept watercolors, gouache, acrylics, graphite, pen-and-ink, colored pencils, markers, and collage. – 400 Series Mixed Media Cards, Pkg of 100 with FREE Stencil.
Fun summer art idea 2: Distressed graphite postcards
You will need even less art supplies for this postcard making activity as this drawing activity only requires a soft graphite (4 to 9 B), an eraser and card-stock paper.
Adults will benefit from this activity as well as it shows us how not to be too attached to the end result when we make art. It teaches us to accept wrecking up something we just did draw by erasing parts of it, drawing just to enjoy the process without too much pressure about making a good drawing every time we draw.
Fun summer art idea 3: Watercolor and mixed media postcards
This post will show you how to paint a textured watercolor background using various techniques like dripping alcohol, sprinkling salt, using plastic wrap, sponges….and then add patterns or doodles on top of that background. You can try all of these techniques on Yupo paper as well, as yupo works so great with visual textures.
Fun summer art idea 4: Use a Spirograph to make the background of your mixed media postcards
This activity requires a bit more supplies and might be better suited for tweens and teens than kids. Although I am sure kids will have fun with the Spirograph part 🙂
To make these mixed media postcards you will need:
All kids and adults like doodling and having fun with zentangles. On a postcard sized painting, you can add patterns and be done in less than 15-30 minutes. It is a great way to try your hand at zentangling 🙂
To make these watercolor and zentangle postcards you will need:
Originally from France, I have been living in North Vancouver, Canada for the past 20 years.
My work has been collected and exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally. I am also part of the Art Rentals and sales program of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Many of my paintings have been published in Art books and magazines (Artist Magazine, Watercolor Artist Magazine, Acrylic Magazine, International Artist Magazine). I wrote 2 art instruction books with North Light/F+W Books.
I have been writing for the last 5 years for my blog: paintingdemos.com, that has a mailing list of about 10 000 subscribers and about 20 000 visitors per month.
I am an active member in the community, as a co-founder of the North Shore Art crawl, a co-founder of a weekly life drawing group, a board member of the North Vancouver Arts Council, and have been invited as a juror for public art, art grants and juried exhibitions. You can read more about my collaborations here.
