Play: These art kits, watercolor tutorials and virtual classes offer plenty of creative fun.
ART KITS AND VIRTUAL CLASSES FOR GROWN-UP FUN
One of the great joys of childhood was the hours we spent dabbling in finger paints, coloring with all 64 crayons and swirling brushes in the jelly-bean hues of a watercolor pan. Those art supplies materialized seemingly out of nowhere — thanks, Mom! thank you, teachers! — and our sole responsibility was to create and paint with abandon, lost in the whirls and whorls of color for a sunny afternoon.
Of course, that escape still exists in adulthood, and learning something new or acquiring a new hobby adds to the delight. But now we’re the ones who have to go scrounge up the brushes, find the right kind of paper and the right kind of paint in all the right hues … and take the many trips to the craft store for supplies forgotten on the first go-round. And the second.
Marianna Narowski had a day like that four years ago — two arts and crafts shopping runs in one irritating afternoon. She was cooking a meal-kit dinner that night when inspiration struck. Where was the Blue Apron for art projects?
Today, you’ll find art kits — including Narowski’s Adults & Crafts and Sarah Cray’s Let’s Make Art boxes — across the internet. And art supply shops and studios, which used to host in-person classes, have joined in the fun, offering supply kits and virtual classes, too. Here’s just a sampling of ways to get creative.
Let’s Make Art
Sacramento State alum and artist Sarah Cray launched Let’s Make Art — a line of art project kits and online tutorials — from her Missouri home in 2018 with the idea that art and creativity should be accessible to everyone. Her website offers all the art supplies you’d expect, but its genius lies in its creative project kits. Teens and adults can learn to paint watercolor hydrangeas or create Frida Kahlo-inspired art journals. Kids will be transfixed by the kits for intergalactic watercolors or Mondrian-inspired oil pastels.
The kits include all the necessary supplies for a project, whether you order one ($15), a box ($45 for four different projects) or a monthly subscription ($35 per box). And you get Cray and her team, too, via free weekly tutorials on the Let’s Make Art Youtube channel that don’t just teach you how to use gouache to paint dreamy clouds in a rosy sky, for example. They also encourage you to be kind to yourself, stop comparing yourself to others and — most importantly — have fun.
We’re not the only ones smitten by all this. That Youtube channel has more than 100,000 subscribers, and you’ll find the #Letsmakeart hashtag all over Instagram, where tens of thousands of fans have shared their colorful creations.
DETAILS » Browse the art supplies (a palette with two brushes is $21) and kits at www.letsmakeart.com. Check out the free Let’s Make Art tutorials by Cray, mixed media artist Jesse Petersen and lettering artist Nicole Miyuki on Youtube.