I am excited to be participating in a fun new art series all about exploring easy art projects for kids. This week everyone is sharing creative ways to explore watercolors with kids (links at the bottom of the post) . Watercolors are so versatile and a great medium to encourage creativity. Read on to find our how we explored Pour Painting with Watercolors, simple process art for kids.

Exploring Process Art

Pour Painting is such a simple and wonderful way to explore process art with kids. Have you seen Holton Rower’s Tall Paintings? They are amazing! For Annika’s Art Party, we had so much fun exploring our version of Pour Painting. We were so excited to explore this process again, this time using watercolors.

Pour Painting Supplies:

Thick Watercolor paper
Painters tape
A Board just larger than you paper
Water and brush ~ to wet the paper before you begin.
Primary Watercolors ~ we used artist quality pigments diluted with water, although liquid watercolors will work.
Bin to catch all the drips of watercolors
Spray bottle for water ~ optional

The process is similar to how we created our acrylic pour painting. I helped the kids tape the watercolor paper to a board. Once the paper was secure, the kids painted water onto their paper. Making sure to cover the entire sheet. This step is important, so make sure you don’t skip it!

We chose to work only with primary colors. Limiting the color pallet will help avoid the muddy colors, and encourage colors mixing. As the kids tilted their board back and forth, the paint began to run together. They were able to mix green, orange and purple right on their paper. Once they were satisfied, they tipped the board pouring the excess paint into the bin.

The process is so simple and quick, leaving the kids wanting more. I encouraged them to keep adding paint layers to their wet paper. It would be ideal to let it dry between layers, but lets face it the kids would have lost interest by then! They added 5-6 layers of paint before moving on to something else. Love that!

I love the beautiful layers of watercolors mingling on the paper.

I think this was the 4th layer of watercolor that was added to this piece. The depth of color is beautiful. We will be visiting this simple art process again soon. There is something so relaxing and mesmerizing about watching the paint pool and run together.

We have explored watercolors on a number of unique surfaces including wet glue, melting ice and over oil pastels. However, this is my favorite watercolor technique that we have tried so far. It is so simple and the results are stunning!