With the Kids

Make Outdoor Art with Water Guns

Get Out and Play Summer Series Guest Post by Sarah of Our Daily Craft

My daughter and I like doing art in all kinds of ways, and in the summer we want to be outside as much as we can, so it’s a natural to find art projects we can do outside.

Outdoor Water Gun Spray Painting

Make Outdoor Art with Water Guns

This easy water gun art project doesn’t take much in the way of prep or setup, and it’s a lot of fun. You could even do it with a group of kids for a fun outdoor party or play date activity that the grown ups will want to get into, too.

Supplies for Outdoor Water Guns:

  • Water guns (ours came from the dollar spot at Target)
  • Liquid watercolors or materials to make your own (see below)
  • Eyedropper or medicine syringe
  • Large paper
  • Tape
  • A fence

Making Liquid Watercolors:

If you don’t already have liquid watercolors, you can easily make your own.

Combine a cup of boiling water with a tablespoon of vinegar. Divide into smaller containers and add a few drops (ours shown have four or five drops each) of food coloring; we used neon colors.

Painting with Water Guns:

The best way we found to get the liquid watercolors into the water guns was using a plastic syringe from the pharmacy that’s meant to be used to measure liquid medicine. The tip fit perfectly into the hole of the water gun.

Fill the guns with liquid watercolors. I had two guns but we ended up using them one at a time anyway.

Tape a couple of pieces from a long roll of paper onto a fence. You can also do this on the ground if you don’t have a fence handy, but you’ll want to weigh down the corners so your paper doesn’t blow away.

Spray the guns at the paper, changing colors when you like.

water-gun-painting

This was a lot of fun both both of us, and it was interesting to see the difference in color between when the paint was wet and dry.

We’d love to try this again with stronger paint colors, it was lots of fun!

Let's Get Out and Play This Summer

Sarah E. White is a crafter, writer and mom living in Arkansas. She writes about crafting with and for kids, creativity for moms and other busy people and creating the life you’ve always wanted at her site Our Daily Craft.

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