Plan a creative summer with these simple summer art activities for children. These open-ended art projects can easily be done at home. Find more seasonal activities for kids here.
Summer Art Activities Children Love
The long days of summer create a fantastic opportunity for children to get involved in artistic projects. Summer’s warm weather also makes it easy to take messier projects outdoors. Here are some of our favorite art ideas for summer vacation.
#1 Make Art with Nature
Nature creates some of the very best art materials! Collect materials on a nature walk, and then see how many creative ways you can use them.
You can create mandalas, fairy villages, and welcoming homes for animals. Use twigs, leaves, and stones to make faces.
It’s also fun to paint items like pine cones. Add some googley eyes and felt ears to create an animal – or an invented creature!
Got sticks? You can make all sorts of fantastic things out of sticks!
#2 Draw, Color, and Paint Outside
Nature provides all sorts of inspiration for drawings and paintings! Bring a notebook and pencil the next time you go on a hike, and take a moment to sketch as you rest. Make it a habit to bring these materials along whenever you are on the go.
If you want to get fancy, you can add colored pencils, crayons, or even a portable watercolor set!
We love this ice cream kindness challenge that includes colouring.
#3 Draw Pictures and Paint with Water
Painting with water is my absolute favorite summer art activity for toddlers and preschoolers. It’s a fun way to cool down on a hot day, it’s virtually mess free, and sometimes things even wind up cleaner at the end of the day.
Use water to paint illustrations on the hot pavement. You can even play Pictionary this way! Try using sticks and other plants as paint brushes for this activity.
It’s also completely appropriate for children to paint objects with water – outdoor furniture or your home’s outer walls and windows, for example – as a process activity with no set final product.
#4 Embrace Messy Art Projects
It’s much easier to work on messy projects when it is warm enough to take them outside!
Summer is the perfect time to pull out the sidewalk paint. Toddlers and preschoolers often wind up covered in it, and this way you can simply rinse them off.
Make sandbox mudpies. Decorate them with rocks, sticks, and leaves.
Go to the beach and use your feet or a stick to create intricate designs in the sand. Build a sand castle, and add shells as decoration.
#5 Make Big Art
Sidewalks provide a fantastic canvas for children’s artwork! Take some sidewalk chalk and decorate your driveway and sidewalks. One of my all time favorite childhood memories involved drawing a life size dinosaur in a parking lot.
Create giant cardboard canvases. Transform cardboard boxes into dollhouses and fairy wings. Create for younger kids with this nature mural outdoor art activity.
You’ll notice that most of these projects don’t create a polished final product. Like summer, they are fleeting. Enjoy the process. Your child is building important skills as they create. Summer art projects build fine motor skills, encourage self-expression, and provide a backdrop for hours of imaginative play.
You might also enjoy these year-round art activities for kids.
These free summer bookmarks are a great colouring activity.
What are your favourite summer art activities for children?
Where to next?
- Find 50 fun things to do outside at home here
- Another great summer activity is family walks. Find my favourite things to do on a walk with kids here.
- Find my favourite summer outdoor activities for kids here.
Ad- Kid’s summer activity pack
