Rubber Cement and Watercolor Resist Art for Kids

This watercolor resist art can turn a canvas into a beautiful work of art! With rubber cement instead of painter’s tape, make any design you want!

This is my one of my absolute favorite painting techniques for kids. We made these pieces of ‘LOVE‘ watercolor resist art for Valentine’s Day to give to the kids’ grandparents, but I want to go and make a ton more with so many different designs!

And I promise, the kids had as much fun as I did…almost. We used watercolor and rubber cement as an easy alternative to painter’s tape!

Watercolor Resist Art for Kids

So..resist art. This is a technique where a portion of the canvas/paper is covered and then painted over. When you remove the covering, you are left with a blank area. That is my very un-technical (is that even a word?) description of it, The Artful Parent has some really fun resist art techniques to try, including the one we used.

To make resist art easy to set up, we typically use painters tape. However, to make curved areas like letters, painters tape can be difficult to use, so we tried rubber cement and found it to be really wonderful.

What you need for this watercolor resist art:

canvas

rubber cement

watercolors

coarse salt

paintbrushes or pipettes

Traditionally when doing resist art, we have used painter’s tape or stickers. For this project, we tried doing it with rubber cement because I wanted to create my own shapes, and I just love the way it turned out. Bonus, it was SIMPLE. I found this rubber cement in the kid’s art section of Walmart and it was inexpensive. Here are some of the supplies we used for your shopping convenience!

To Make this Watercolor Resist Art:

To begin, sketch out a drawing on your canvas and fill it in with the rubber cement. 

Once the rubber cement is dry, paint the entire canvas with watercolors, or drip liquid watercolors onto the canvas.

M (4) made his a bit more watery than A (2) and I kind of liked the way the extra liquid looked once dry, so dripping liquid watercolors with pipettes could be fun!

After the entire canvas is painted (sides included), sprinkle the coarse salt all over the watercolors. This is where the extra liquid really turned out nice. You can see below how the salted areas looked when dry.

The rubber cement just rubs right off easily!

This is what ours looked like without the rubber cement! At this point you could leave it blank, color it in, outline it, etc…

We went with a gold Sharpie for our outline.

They are going to make the PERFECT Valentine’s Day presents!!

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