Paint Night at Home

Like most of you, quarantine left my family looking for new ways to entertain ourselves while locked up tight in our homes. My family tried paint nights and they were a lot of fun! This is something our busy schedules would have never allowed time for, but now even as life is blooming again, this will stay in our rotation of fun family activities.

Materials

• Canvas– Michael’s sells 10-packs of canvas for about $11. Amazon sells them too. You can always opt for heavy art paper in a pinch.
• Brushes– These are the kind that we used and they are holding up just fine for this project. Every project will specify what kind of brushes you need so be sure to check that out before beginning.
• Paint– When you choose a project, try to choose one with colors that can be used in other paintings. A little goes a long way!!

Choosing your artwork

We found an awesome website to help us through the process, https://stepbysteppainting.net. This site has everything from koala bears, to beach scenes, to Christmas paintings — there is definitely something for everyone! We preferred going at our own pace by reading the hand-written directions over watching the video. The written instructions are specific and extremely helpful! They will give you the difficulty level, a list of all the colors needed and which brush sizes are needed (I did not even know that was a thing until now). Don’t get hung up on finding precisely the right color (unless you want to). We even used white paint leftover from painting our ceiling when we ran out of the acrylic white. The goal here is fun; these are (probably) not going on display at the Louvre.

Our process

I highly recommend covering your table with a disposable table cloth. We allocated paint to each person on a paper plate. You don’t need a lot! Don’t forget plastic cups of water for cleaning your paint brushes. NOTE: be very careful not to mix the paint water with your own beverage (Yep, I did that. Yuck.). I would say that kids as young as five can follow along with the simple projects, but it is hard when everyone wants to go at different speeds or has different abilities. Making sure that everyone focuses on the fun family time over their artistic skills may help curb some tears (yes, again, speaking from experience). You’ll need a laptop or tablet screen big enough for everyone to see and follow along from. Set that up out of the way of the paint and water cups- just to be safe! We went through each step together, laughing, groaning and offering suggestions to each other. What we will do with this pile of multiple identical paintings, I’m not sure yet! But the experience is definitely worth it! Come back and show me your paintings after you try this!

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