Watercolor Temple Silhouette DIY

I am SO excited to show you my latest craft and newest love!

I have never painted before because I am such a perfectionist, but I have all these paintings in my mind that I dream up and wish I could just stick a flash drive in my ear and print it out…

As I was looking for a craft to fulfill the Duty To God requirement for Wolf Scouts to ‘create a display of a religious monument’, I knew I wanted to do something more than sand a wood block and mod podge a picture on it. I searched on Pinterest and found this beauty:

This is totally what I wanted to do with the scouts. That way it could be personalized and take up the whole time (which is sometimes half the battle with the scouts!

So, here’s how to make your own watercolor temple artwork on the cheap:

Now remember, this was a project we were doing with the Cub Scouts, so we were keeping costs to a total minimum. I actually had all the supplies right here at home. (Thank you back to school shopping sales where I stocked up on tons of paint sets!)

The first part may just be the hardest: Deciding which temple to paint. I liked the way the Payson Temple looked, so that is what we did. First, I googled clip art of the temple and free-handed the outline using a ruler to get nice straight lines.

Then, I folded the temple that I free handed in half and cut it out so that it would be perfectly symmetrical.

The next step is to decide whether you want to paint the inside of the temple or paint around the outside of it, leaving the temple white. If you are going to paint just the temple white, use the stencil you just made to trace onto a different piece of paper and cut it out to use as another stencil (this is so hard to explain just using words).

Here is an example of using the stencil to paint just the temple. I used just regular card stock for the paper and the Crayola paint sets you can get anywhere.

When you are painting, you want to make sure to get right up to the edge otherwise you won’t have a very clear outline of the temple.

Here is the finished product! I did one of each and I am just loving them! I want to paint more and more. I think I will be venturing out into the painting realm more often!

We did this for our Family Home Evening as a test run and I loved seeing the individuality of each kid’s art work. They were so proud of themselves as artists. And trust me, I was too! So much fun!

Do you paint with your with your family?