The Grown-Up’s Guide series features how-to projects, creative prompts, and crafting activities that will inspire you and your little ones to spend hours of messy fun together. Now you can learn the fun, trendy paint pouring technique—and teach your kids to do it too!

Paint pouring, also known as fluid art, uses acrylic paint and a variety of everyday tools to create colorful, abstract art poured on canvases and other surfaces. With The Grown-Up’s Guide to Painting With Kids, prepare to get messy—some techniques require touching or even hitting the paint—but that’s half the fun! Kids will love the tactile nature of paint pouring, while you and the other grown-ups in their lives will feel good knowing that your children are exercising their creative and artistic playful side. Consider doing the projects outside, where it's OK to make a mess!

The book opens with an introduction to the affordable tools required to pour paint, from cups and canvases to stir sticks, paper, reusable straws, and more. Older kids—with the help of their parents, of course—might even learn to use a heat torch to create the cell-like structure typical in fluid art. Techniques are outlined so that you and your children can read about the pouring process before getting started. Then there are chapters on color mixing tips, instructions for finishing paintings with varnish and other materials, and much more. The step-by-step projects that follow are fun, easy, and easily customizable by color, surface, and skill level. They can even be done on surfaces other than canvas, such as coasters, pieces of wood, gift boxes, and much more.

Kids of all ages will love pouring paint. You can help too, ensuring family togetherness for hours as you and your children learn to create colorful, abstract art together with The Grown-Up’s Guide to Painting With Kids.

Jennifer McCully