Wet on Wet Watercolour Painting for Kids

Wet on wet watercolour painting is a simple process art activity that is easy to do and totally mesmerising!

This simple watercolour painting for kids activity is all about exploring and experimenting. Watching the paint flow and move across the paper as the colours swirl and combine with each other is a magic process that kids of all ages will love!

What is Process Art and Why is it Important?

Process art is an activity where the focus is on the doing, not on what you create in the end.

When we do process art we don’t have any idea what the finished product will be, and in fact we don’t care much about how things look in the end, because the important part is the doing. The important part is seeing what happens as you create.

Process art is important for kids because it allows them to explore, experiment, and discover how things work without any preconceived ideas or expectations holding them back.

It allows kids to go with their feelings and imaginations and to simply create whatever comes to mind, rather than trying to conform to an idea of what something ‘should’ look like.

Process art can be wild, and messy, often the end product is a wet, soggy, brown mess, but process art is also fun and freeing and makes children feel confident and capable.

Process art is also easy.

Because we don’t care what the finished product looks like, there is no right or wrong way to do process art. After offering a few guidelines to keep mess under control and some instruction on how the art materials could be used, adults get to step back and just let it happen, or even better, join in!

Wet on Wet Watercolour Process Art Activity

This wet on wet watercolour painting activity is easy enough for toddlers and preschoolers to try, and so cool that older kids will love doing this activity too.

Materials

• Something to cover your work surface, smocks or aprons, a damp cloth to clean up spills
• Paper – Watercolour paper works well, or whatever paper you have
• Something to wet your paper – a squirty bottle of water, or a wet sponge.
• Liquid water colours or watercolour paint tubes
• Containers for your water colours
• droppers, spoons, or small paint brushes

We used liquid watercolours for our wet on wet painting, diluted with a little water.

We used regular printer paper, which has a slightly different affect, and takes a while to dry compared watercolour paper. Try experimenting with different kinds of paper to see what happens.

We used a small spray bottle to wet our paper, but you could also use a large brush and a container of water, or a wet sponge. We chose to to use pipettes to drop out paint on the paper, but a brush works just as well.

Instructions

The process for this wet on wet art activity couldn’t be easier – wet the paper quite a bit, then drop the paint onto the wet paper and watch what happens.

It is fascinating to watch the paint creep across the wet paper, moving and swirling and combining with other colours.

This is the perfect activity to encourage your kids to experiment. Ask lots of questions and encourage them to guess what might happen and then try it and see if they are correct.

Your kids will discover that the paint acts differently depending on how wet the paper is, and if you add a little more water onto painted paper it will change again!

This is also a great activity to encourage lots of descriptive language. There are so many interesting ways to describe what happens to the paint on the wet paper!

The end product of this watercolour painting for kids activity will probably be lots of paper dripping in paint! You can let some dry to see how they turn out, but remember this activity is about the process, not the product, so it is ok to put all the paper into the recycling when you are done!

More Process Art Ideas for Kids

 If your kids love art they’ll love these easy process art activities: