Today I made some cute house rocks. My mom does regular art workshops at a local rest home so she is always on the look-out for simple and satisfying art projects that can be successful for people at varying levels of dexterity and courage. When we were hiking up Middle Cottonwood Trail last weekend, Mom started noticing house-shaped rocks and thought “Hey! We can paint rocks!” (or something like that). She put us to work collecting them as we went along; picking them up, inspecting them, throwing them back or keeping them. By the time we’d reached the bottom of the trail, her backpack was full of rocks and, as you can imagine, pretty heavy! She went on an adventure to Grandma’s house this week to forage for more and wound up with a good pile of more-or-less house-ish shaped rocks.

When I got to her house earlier today, she had the first bunch all scrubbed up and ready to paint. We took the smaller and bumpier rocks to try it out on and saved the best and bigger ones for the rest home residents to use later this week. We set out a couple colors: just red, black and white, then mixed them up as needed. I did a tiny one first:

As this was a test session, we paid attention to the things that were difficult and how to improve them. The hardest part for me was the size: Even with an itty bitty teeny tiny paint brush it was hard to make the lines small enough to get much detail. And I’m a steady-handed youngin’ with good eye-sight. That said, I had fun doing it and I liked having the limited colors to pick from.

Next, I tried a bigger rock! 

It was definitely easier to work with and I was able to be a little more detailed which was fun! I liked my little cacti and doing the swirls on the roof was a little too tiny to be easy but I think they turned out cute.