Get Creative with Painted Rocks in the Garden

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Making painted rocks is fun and adds creativity to your garden. What kind of paint works best? How do you get started? Check out this post to find out about this fun garden activity for kids.

Do you need a little pizazz to decorate your garden? Painting rocks is fun and has limitless variations. Check out this great activity to get your kid’s creativity going in the garden, painted rocks. Even find out what paint to use on rocks.

What kind of paint to use on rocks

The best paint for rocks is one that won’t come off in the weather. We think Amy Howard Chalk Paint is a great paint for outdoor rocks because we painted some stepping stones with it and they are holding up great two years later. It’s a great choice. 

Garden rocks

Painted garden rocks are so adorable. You can use them for garden markers, something for the kids to arrange when they are in the garden and they’re done gardening, or just as decorations to liven up a corner of the garden.  You could even decorate inside with them. What would you use them for? We used ours to make games. 

Now that we’ve decided what is the best paint to use on rocks, let’s talk about what we want to paint on them.

The first step for painted garden stones is to put a base coat on them of a solid color. Then you can decide if you want to make them into a flower, bug or something abstract. We used our Amy Howard Chalk paint with big brushes for the first coat and then we used smaller brushes to paint on the details.

A key to remember here is this paint is not washable. I asked my parents to send their kids in old clothes knowing that some of the paint might get on their clothes and would not come off. I also put smocks on the kids and covered our painting surface. There were still accidents. That is to be expected.

I let the kids paint the rocks however they wanted. Their creativity is budding and I try to encourage it any way I can. 

I let them each paint several rocks, some to leave in our garden and one to take home with them for their house. They LOVE to show their parents the art they make and I love watching them be proud of their painted rocks.

Ladybug painted rocks

For even more fun in the garden, I made some ladybug painted rocks and some bee painted rocks and we used them to play tic tac toe. We use our stepping stones on the patio to play, but you can draw a board out as well or make a permanent board on concrete, wood or whatever you have available. 

Check out these daycare gardening activities for toddlers here.