Rock Painting

          

I am a member of a few rock painting groups on Facebook, and I love seeing all the creativity and variety of rocks on there. Some people are exceptionally talented. One of the children in my class paints rocks with her mum and hides them around the city for other people to find. She loves it, and she brought a rock in to hide at school, for the other children to find.

She inspired me to paint rocks for all the children in my class, and for each of my colleagues, as a farewell gift when I moved to another city. I needed to find a gift that would not cost much, or be too time consuming to create, as I needed 40 gifts. But I wanted it to be personal, and painted rocks met all my needs perfectly.

 I was living in a van at the time, and my companion and I would go and stay at a beach each weekend. One beach just out of Auckland, Kaiaua, was full of beautiful smooth stones, so I gathered up some stones to paint.

I started by painting a white base coat on each rock, followed by a second coat when they were dry.

I had a small paint tray with blobs of various coloured acrylic paints, cotton buds, and some matchsticks. I didn't have a paintbrush.

I painted a background colour on each stone. You can experiment with background colours, and use two complementary colours together, such as yellow and orange, or blue and green, to create an interesting background.

The easiest thing for me to paint using cottonbuds and matchsticks was dots.

At first I wasn't sure what I was doing but as I kept going I became more confident and started generating ideas for patterns and images.

The sunset was deceptively easy - the background was orange and yellow, and I used black paint for the foreground. You don't need a smooth line, so the cotton buds and matchsticks worked well.

If I wasn't happy with my rock, I wiped the paint off with a damp paper towel and started again.

On the backs of the rocks, I wanted to write whakatauki, or Maori proverbs. I realised that this was virtually impossible to fit on a small stone, so I found small phrases to fit, such as "Kia Maia - be brave and bold".

My favourite is the koru. I made several koru rocks, but made each one different.

I painted a rocket ship because some of the boys in my class love space and rocket ships.

You don't need to be creative or artistic to paint beautiful rocks. You just need to be willing to have a go and have fun.

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