Watercolor Painting With Squirt Watercolor Guns: DIY Project

Last year, I made a summer bucket list that included getting outdoors more with the kids and trying our hand at watercolor painting using squirt guns. Unfortunately, we didn’t put much of a dent in our list.

So, this summer I’ve been determined to make it all happen. My daughter absolutely loves turtles, so we decided to make a turtle watercolor painting to hang in front of our house.

I love how this project turned out so much that we wanted to show you how to do it with your kids.

Watercolor Painting With Squirt Watercolor Guns – what you need:

Heavy utility fabric – we cut ours to 1.5 yards wide
Hemp cord or rope (optional – for hanging)
Bamboo (optional – for hanging)
Squirt guns
Fabric or outdoor paint – or a combination of both, which is what we used
Water
Fabric marker
Sharpie

This is the perfect summer project, just make sure kids are extra careful and wear old clothes or art smocks over their clothes when working with fabric or outdoor paint.

Begin by sketching an object (such as the turtle we did) onto the fabric using a fabric marker. Don’t worry if it gets messy, the fabric marker lines will disappear once the paint is sprayed on. Before spraying though, go over your final outline with a Sharpie.

Related: 12 Raised Salt Art Projects For Kids

Hang your fabric from a line of rope outside. Make sure you either do it over grass (which can be cut) or lay plastic on the ground to protect concrete from the paint that will run off the fabric.

When it comes to mixing your paints, there’s no exact science to this, but it needs to be thin enough to squirt through the watercolor gun nozzle. For the fabric paint we found we only needed a small amount of water to be mixed in, but with the outdoor paint (which is thicker) we did a 50/50 mix of paint to water.

Once we had sprayed a variety of colors on, we then used just a few drops of color mixed with water to give the painting a full watercolor effect.

By having a sketch on the fabric allows kids to somewhat separate the colors a little, although they will run outside the lines, and that’s perfectly okay too.

In no time you’ll be left with a beautiful piece of art. Make sure it’s completely dry before moving it off the line, especially if working with a large piece.

You can just use removable double-sided hanging tape to hang this on your wall, but if you want to hang it from a stick (or piece of bamboo-like we did), then you will need to hand-stitch small pieces of hemp cord into loops across the top of the project.

Begin by measuring and marking (using the fabric marker) where the loops will go.