wax resist watercolor painting of blue sky and white clouds

This easy watercolor painting activity is simple enough that even little kids can do it, but the end result is lovely. The good news is there’s no wrong way to draw a cloud, so this takes away the perfectionist tendencies. Here we used the wax resist technique to draw clouds with a white or peach colored crayon and then painted over them with a color that represented the sky.

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Materials:

white (or light colored) crayon
watercolor paper
watercolor paint
paintbrush (any size that isn’t a tiny detail brush)
paper towel
container of water
(optional) masking tape and cardboard backing to tape the paper onto

Steps:

Tape the watercolor paper to cardboard backing. (This step is optional but most watercolor paper will curl up once it’s wet unless you’re using a professional grade watercolor paper such as one made of pure cotton.) Even the side of a large cereal box will work as a backing as long as it’s larger than your watercolor paper.
Use a white or light colored crayon to draw clouds all across the paper. Feel free to look up pictures of clouds ahead of time for reference. Be sure to press hard when drawing your clouds. Don’t forget to color in the center of each cloud. (See the note below about using different crayon colors.)
Choose a color to represent your sky. (See the note below about getting creative with the color of the sky.) Add just a tiny bit of water to that paint color. Paint across the entire paper swiping color right over the clouds you drew. Reapply color to your brush as needed. Only add more water when absolutely needed. Horizontal strokes work best.
When the paper is fully painted (all the way to the edges), leave it to dry.
Once the painting is fully dry, carefully remove the tape from the edges. My masking tape did pull up a little bit of my paper, so be sure to peel your tape off slowly to avoid big tears.

blue sky watercolor painting with wax resist clouds — Cloudy Sky Wax Resist Watercolor Painting

And in no time you have a lovely watercolor painting of clouds in the sky.

You can see how this activity is simple enough to do with even the littles of kids.

It would be fun to do this with older kids after studying the different kinds of clouds.

Note about crayon colors:

If you’re doing this activity with little kids, they will have difficulty seeing where they’ve drawn their white clouds on white paper. Consider using another light-colored crayon. The test page pictured here shows clouds drawn with an apricot colored crayon, and the sunset painting shows clouds drawn with a lavender crayon (though this child didn’t press very hard when drawing her clouds).

Note about sky color:

The easiest way to paint a sky is with one ready-made blue paint. But you may want to get creative and play with the idea of what really is sky color? We love the book Sky Color (linked below) which explores this concept when the main character has to paint the sky portion of a class mural, but the color blue is missing.