there is a tradition of painted garden sticks on the island where we live. Barbara Klunder, an artist and neighbour of ours, 'invented' them years ago. I asked her for the story:
I thought them up because when I moved to the Island, I had planted a few bushes and flowers. They never came up because of the huge amount of shade I have there. So, after looking forward to pink here and blue there, I just painted some sticks I found on the beach and stuck them in where I predicted the colour would have been. Every spring after that I painted up a few more, and repaired the winter damage of the others. After a while, they started gathering attention from the tourists, and were in the first issue of Canadian Garden magazine.I haven't seen any around in a while, so the kids and I thought we'd make some.
After that, I started noticing African sticks, Aboriginal Australian sticks, etc....it seems wherever there have been paint and trees, there have been painted sticks.
we gathered some nice pieces of driftwood from the beach
painted them up
and planted them
Here's a mini-tutorial:
Materials- Sticks, primer, acrylic paints, brushes
Ages- good for anyone who can paint
1- Gather sticks. Long and skinny look the nicest. If you can't get driftwood, peel the bark off of some dry sticks.
2- Prime them. (optional) I primed them with white wood primer, but any primer would probably do. You could skip this step but the paint goes on easily when they are primed.
3- Paint away! For younger kids, you could paint the stick a solid colour and let them paint on top of it. My 7 year old had no trouble painting the whole sticks, but my 3 year old only wanted to do splotches and little sections so I painted his sticks solid colours and he painted over them.
4- Plant them in your garden and enjoy!