Summer is long. The first week feels like freedom; by the third, the "I'm bored" chorus has set in and the days stretch out with nothing scheduled. A good stash of summer art activities for kids is one of the best ways to fill that space — they soak up time, they get kids outside and away from screens, and they leave you with a stack of drawings worth remembering the season by.
None of these need fancy supplies or a Pinterest-perfect setup. They're built for real summer days, mess and all.
Filling Those Long Summer Days
The secret to surviving the long stretch isn't one big activity — it's a rotation of easy ones you can pull out on demand. Set up a simple "summer art station": a bin with chalk, washable paint, paper, markers, and an old shirt for a smock, parked somewhere you don't mind getting messy.
With supplies always within reach, "I'm bored" turns into "go make something" without a thirty-minute prep on your end. The lower the barrier, the more often kids reach for it.
Lean into summer's biggest advantage: you can take art outside, where mess cleans up with a hose and there's room to go big. That single shift opens up a whole category of activities that would be a nightmare indoors.
Outdoor Chalk and Nature Art
Sidewalk chalk is the workhorse of summer art. Beyond hopscotch, try chalk murals across the whole driveway, life-size self-portraits where kids lie down and trace each other, or a chalk "town" with roads for bikes and scooters to drive through.
Nature itself is an art supply. Send kids on a hunt for leaves, petals, sticks, and stones, then arrange them into pictures or patterns on the grass — land art that gets photographed before the wind takes it. Leaf rubbings with the side of a crayon and bark textures make great take-home pieces too.
For a quieter activity, mud painting with sticks and a cup of water, or "painting" the fence with a bucket of plain water and a big brush, can absorb a surprisingly long stretch of a hot afternoon.
Water, Ice, and Splatter Painting
Heat makes messy, water-based art perfect for summer. Freeze watered-down washable paint in ice cube trays with popsicle sticks for handles, then let kids paint with melting ice cubes on paper — the colors blend as they slide and drip.
Splatter painting is pure summer joy: tape paper to a fence, load brushes with watery paint, and flick away. It's gloriously messy, completely outdoors, and even the youngest kids can do it. Squirt-bottle painting and spray-bottle "tie-dye" on old white shirts work the same way.
For a calmer version, bubble painting — dish soap, paint, and water blown through a straw until bubbles overflow onto paper — makes delicate prints and keeps kids busy chasing the perfect pop.
A Summer Sketch Journal
Give each child a cheap blank notebook at the start of summer and call it their summer sketchbook. The job is loose: draw one thing from each day or each outing — the popsicle they ate, the bug they found, the pool, the fireworks.
By August, that notebook becomes a homemade diary of the whole season in their own hand. It's a gentle daily ritual that builds drawing habit and observation, and it gives a restless kid something to reach for in the in-between moments.
Keep it pressure-free. A scribble counts. The goal is a record of summer, not a portfolio, and the more relaxed it stays the more likely they are to keep going.
Drawing on the Road and at the Beach
Summer means travel, and a small art kit is the best screen-free entertainment a car or plane can hold. A clipboard, a zip pouch of markers, and a pad of paper turn dead time into drawing time. Prompt games like "draw what you think the destination looks like" or "draw the weirdest thing you saw out the window" keep it fresh.
At the beach, the sand is the canvas. Drawing with a stick, building and decorating sandcastles, and arranging shells and seaweed into pictures are all art, even if they wash away. Photograph the good ones before the tide claims them.
A travel sketchbook doubles as a souvenir. The drawings a child makes on vacation capture the trip better than any gift-shop trinket, and they cost nothing.
Backup Ideas for Rainy Summer Days
Summer storms happen, and a couple of indoor aces keep a rained-in afternoon from melting down. A blanket-fort gallery — drawings taped up inside a fort by flashlight — turns bad weather into an event. So does a "draw the rain" challenge: who can make the most dramatic storm scene?
Keep a few mess-contained options ready: window markers for drawing on the glass while watching the rain, a roll of paper rolled out across the floor for a giant group mural, or a stack of printables and dot-to-dots for the lowest-energy moments.
The point is to have the rainy-day kit assembled before you need it, so a sudden downpour means "great, let's do the indoor thing" instead of a scramble.
Turn the Summer's Best Drawings Into a Video
By the end of summer you'll have a glorious pile of chalk photos, sketchbook pages, and splatter masterpieces. Pick the standouts and turn them into something that captures the whole season's creativity in one go.
Bringing a favorite summer drawing to life as a short animation makes a perfect end-of-summer keepsake — the sandcastle creature your kid invented, or the dramatic storm they drew, actually moving. It's a wonderful thing to share with grandparents who missed the summer up close.
It also gives the season a satisfying bookend. The sketchbook records what happened; the animation celebrates the best of it, and gives your child one more reason to be proud of a summer well spent making things.
Make the summer's best drawing come alive.
Your first animation is free — no card required.
Animate Your First Drawing — Free