Wax Resist Pond Art

In the last year, we’ve started to produce more artwork for the house with the kids and trying different techniques. One of our favourite techniques that we’ve been using different forms of resist and with this week’s theme for #playfulpreschool being pond life I thought it would be perfect to create some art that spells out our spring every year since they were little. Every spring we bring a little of our pond life inside and watch as the frog spawn from our wildlife pond hatches and the tadpoles grow and develop into froglets on our dining room table. Using a wax resist technique and watercolours is a great way to produce a canvas for the wall.

Materials Needed for Wax Resist Pond Art

Wax Crayons
Watercolour Paints
Canvas or Water Colour Paper

Learning Objectives

• Observation
• Wax resist technique

Creating Wax Resist Pond Art

In our tank, we currently have some large tadpoles that we brought in at the beginning of spring and have been growing steadily since (if you would like to keep tadpoles read more about how to raise them in our Raising Tadpoles Post). So I set up a canvas with suitable coloured wax crayons for drawing the pondweed and tadpoles that she could see in the tank as well as teaching her how to mix our Brusho Watercolours [affiliate link] up so that she had vibrant blues and green watercolours.

If you haven’t used Brusho Watercolours [affiliate link] before they are a loose powder that can be used dry or diluted and are vibrant and colourful, they also stain and can be used on lots of different materials, I’ve had my set for over 10 years and it’s still going strong. When mixed with water they produce a liquid watercolour that you can then use for wax resist art the more water the more dilute the colour is.

With the canvas read to draw she set about drawing the tadpoles, these are easy as we have been working on the shapes that make up the tadpoles, circles for the heads and tails which she combined zig zags (fast swimming) and smooth lines (sitting still).

With the tadpoles drawn we added wavy pond weed to the drawing. It would be great to add different pond elements, goldfish or frogs what ever animals and items take your child’s fancy.

She then used the watercolours to paint over the tadpoles and pond weed to create the finished art on the canvas and we put it to dry.

More Pond themed Preschool Activities