Fineliner and home-made watercolours

If you're looking for a children's art activity that's absorbing and yields beautiful, frameable results, I have just the one: fineliner drawings painted over with liquid watercolours. R came home the other day desperate to do 'water paintings' like the ones they had been doing at kinder, and luckily I had some liquid watercolours ready to go (I made my 'watercolours' from old markers - see this post for details of how I make them; it's very easy). R sat down at the table with fineliners, paper and paints and didn't stop drawing and painting for the next couple of hours. Her brother soon joined her and spent a long time drawing a highly detailed picture of our garden and shed, which inspired R to go outside to scout around for trees and flowers she could draw.

I am so in love with the results of the watercolour session that I've already bought frames for a few of the paintings. The combination of detailed fineliner drawings with glorious colours melting into each other is just beautiful.

Artist at work

Mexican paper flowers hanging in the loungeroom

Some of R's paintings laid out to dry

Silver birch tree and house, by K

Bottlebrush tree

In a moment of inspiration, I persuaded R to do a few tiny pictures to use for making cards. When they were dry I glued them into pre-cut 'frame' cards and put them aside to accompany our end-of-year teacher gifts  - you may have seen them next to the lavender bags we made in this post.

This watercolour session provided literally hours of enjoyment for K and R, and I can't wait to frame some of their work and put it up for us all to enjoy.