Painting Picnic

I had the pleasure of being a guest poster on Mess For Less last month and was happy to share my painting picnic over there. You can find the original post here: Painting Picnic- Mess For Less 

Summer is winding down and we are trying to spend as much time as we can outside!  Here is a fun way to take the painting outdoors! 

I told the girls we were going to go on a painting picnic and I gathered the items needed ahead of time.
We packed the following items in our picnic basket, clip boards, white paper, various sized brushes, paints, container for the paint, blanket, apples and oranges.

I thought it would be fun to bring along fruit for two reasons: To munch on for our snack (of course) and to use as still life art for the girls to paint. This could be a fun way to introduce still life painting with young kids!

To keep it simple we chose to go on our picnic in our own backyard but of course this activity would be great to do at your local park, forest preserve, ocean side (If you you should be so lucky to live near the ocean).

We spread the blanket out and I set up the activity. We talked about the fruit and the meaning of still life painting and I explained that the fruit was there so they could make their own version of still life paining. I didn't want to limit them so I stressed that they could do the still life painting or paint whatever their hearts desired.

My 4 year old chose to paint the apple and orange and my 3 year old said "Mommy, I'm not painting anything, I'm just painting." Both were perfectly acceptable in my eyes! It's about the experience and the process not the final product!!

Can I just tell what a hit this little picnic became! Sometimes I have these grand plans of how an activity is going to go and it fails to meet my expectations. Either the girls are crabby or I thought they would enjoy it but they are bored after awhile. This however was so fun for all of us!

You can just see the concentration in their little faces! We were surrounded by nature and it was calm and peaceful!

We even had an unexpected visitor join us for our picnic fun. My three year old loved letting this ladybug crawl on her arm.

My little artists built up an appetite and the very best part was eating the still life- the apples and oranges when they were done with their work.

That completed our painting picnic!  This will definitely be on our list to do again soon!

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