33 Fun and Easy Summer Painting Ideas for 2024

When the dog days hit and you were looking for something fun to do, why not give summer painting ideas a try? The sunny months are the perfect time of year to explore your creative side and build a collection of summer painting ideas you'll be excited to bring to life.

Even if you've never touched a paintbrush, you can play with easy painting ideas that make keeping cool indoors a much more colorful prospect!

Having a selection of summer painting ideas on hand is ideal when looking for things to do when you're bored, especially if you have little ones on school break.

What better way to keep them busy than producing vibrant works of art to fill your home? With this handy list of fun summer painting ideas primed to celebrate the spirit of the season, you'll be able to slide your easel right next to theirs and paint side by side!

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• Fun Summer Painting Classes
• Easy Summer Painting Ideas for Beginners

Fun Summer Painting Classes

1. Summer Paint and Sip

No matter what your skill level, with paint and sip courses, you can find just the right summer paintings to suit your tastes to get you into a colorful mood!

With paint and sip in Atlanta, paint and sip in Washington, D.C. and paint and sip in San Diego, amateur artists can settle in for artful fun with drinks and friends. Check into paint and sip near you to get your summer sizzling!

2. Online Painting Classes

Wouldn't it be great to find summer painting classes you can take at home? With online painting classes, you can learn to paint without leaving the house!

Set up a studio to capture your summer painting ideas wherever you're most comfortable. You'll have skilled instruction from a talented artist beamed to your favorite device.

3. Try Some Art Classes

Add in-person art classes near you to expand your abilities, no matter where you're starting. Find East Coast art classes in NYC, West Coast art classes in Los Angeles, and even Midwest art classes in Chicago that will help you cover the canvas from edge to edge. 

Summer art classes offer all types of unique mediums and methods for creating something useful and beautiful. Join a class to explore rock painting ideas, tote bag painting ideas, shoe painting ideas and other fun summer projects for kids and adults alike.

Easy Summer Painting Ideas for Beginners 

4. Wish on Fireflies

Add a jar filled with fireflies in a field of dandelions to your step-by-step painting summer bucket list ideas. Glowing with charm and loaded with possibilities, it's a sweet scene that captures the magic of a soft summer night to be enjoyed any time of year! 

5. Steal Away to a Secret Lagoon

Summer painting ideas that invite escape are never a bad thing! Create an image of a technicolor wetland with enchantment hanging from the trees and soft colors transforming the skies above. 

6. Set Sail

See the sunset from a sailboat of your own making with a nautical-themed summer painting idea. Simple horizontal strokes set a fiery sunset backdrop, while glassy reflections and an easy-to-render seaworthy craft with its sails down for the evening.

Toast an evening at sea as your canvas dries and enjoy another summer painting idea ready for the gallery!

7. Paint Yourself a Piece of Paris

Who needs international travel when your summer painting ideas include images of the Eiffel Tower? This artful canvas captures one of the world's most famous structures at an upward angle from a field of lavish blossoms.

Keep your brushstrokes loose and light to add a dream-like gentleness to your work for one of the most aesthetic painting ideas. 

8. Pick Some Flowers

You may not have painting a landscape at the top of your list of easy painting ideas, but you should add it immediately! Begin with a pastel pink sky in the background.

Then, add loose, staggered blocks of layered color to establish a lush forest foreground. Drag darker tree trunks between the blocks and fill the layers with petals and leaves to bring beautiful details to your image.  

9. Do the Dunes

You can find summer painting classes that spotlight seaside scenery with sandy dunes and crashing waves for a lazy warm weather retreat. Add natural touches with loose, gentle strokes and turn your summer painting idea into a window on a more serene world. 

10. Capture Colorful Skies

Are you looking for trippy painting ideas to add to your artistic agenda? Grab a brush and add psychedelic rings of fuchsia, rose and azure to create a mind-boggling sky studded with stars.

Add similar colors to a running stream and as highlights to a bankside pine forest and prepare to trip out!

11. Gnome Your Home

Add a bigger bang to your Fourth of July with a summer painting idea that crackles with magic! Use basic shapes to form a cute, bearded gnome in his best stars and stripes.

Then, fill the black background with bursting fireworks for warm weather festivities guaranteed to do your heart proud! 

12. Find Love in the Moonlight

Seek out summer painting classes featuring couple painting ideas presented with a dash of romance. You'll pair up for a canvas duet that highlights a hidden heart adorning a full moon in perfectly pearlescent colors.

Cool aquas form the lunar halo and majestic firs stand sentinel before their glowing goddess!

13. Shine With the Sunflowers

A trio of sunflowers will add a blast of color to liven up your home art gallery. With summer painting ideas that use complementary hues, you'll have instant fine art sensibilities blooming on your canvas.

Whether you prefer pink flowers, wildflowers or other types, choose the perfect flower painting idea for you and watch your painting skills blossom.

14. Get Stuck

Cartoonish cuteness makes for some of the best easy painting ideas for families to enjoy together! Blocks of bright color and bold linework will reveal an adorable cactus captured mid-wink, a perfect project to get younger artists in on the action.

Gather a few simple summer painting ideas like this and have a paint party play date for your little ones and their friends!

15. Wine a Little

Bring bold contemporary to your easel with a summer painting idea that turns wine glasses into graphic art. A clever sip and paint idea and a straightforward combination of linework and brash, exciting colors is all it takes to finish this tribute to fine wine.

It's a prime choice if you're searching for paint party ideas for adults with a passion for vintage creativity!

16. Find Your Flair for Florals

Try your hand at transparent petals and glimmering glass and recreate your own fabulous floral arrangement, no watering necessary!

Glazing is the trick that creates delicate swirls and shining highlights, achieved with thin washes of paint applied over one another. Pull off this summer painting idea and you'll look like a total pro!

17. Pour Yourself a Little Color

One of the most impressive summer painting ideas for beginning artists to execute is pour painting. This exciting technique achieves stunning marbleized effects using fluid paint that transforms as you move the canvas.

The results are complex and mesmerizing, and only you'll know how easy it was to create!

18. Warm up by the Fire

It's easy to create the soothing glow of a crackling campfire with step-by-step painting courses that show you precisely how the magic happens.

Blending light into dark provides a dusky background, with silhouetted trees creating mid-ground depth. Swaths of red, orange, yellow and white stream together to capture dynamic flames so realistic you can practically feel their warmth!

19. Think Pink

With the proper painting tips for beginners, even new painters can capture the majesty of a pair of rosy flamingos! The finished canvas looks more complex than the techniques it takes to bring it to life.

The secret is creating zones of color that cast the illusion of water before adding vivid corals and cotton candy feathers to these long-legged lovelies.

20. Soak up a Tropical Sunset

Why not throw an island-centered painting session into your collection of summer date ideas? Washes of romantic color create a cosmic sky filled with magical light, making a colonnade of towering silhouette palms appear even more stately. It's a summer painting idea that lets couples conjure their own personal paradise! 

21. Create an Island Paradise

The winsome shapes of nighttime islands provide a never-ending array of summer art ideas that are fun for the whole family to render!

A three-tone palette of white, blue and black dials back the supply list while inviting a sense of freedom to interpret trees and landforms that make sense to each artist's inner vision. You can never have too many tropics in your summer painting ideas!

22. Take to the Open Seas

With the delicate fringe of green fronds framing the horizon, you have the sweetest perspective for a summer painting idea that looks like a Polynesian postcard!

Soft clouds build in the distance, signaling the coming storm. But you'll be safely stationed behind your easel no matter how the weather changes.

23. Flock Together

A pair of snuggling budgies perched on a limb are caught in the spotlight of a full moon in one of the sweetest summer acrylic painting ideas for beginners.

Soft blending is the method that turns your canvas into a mesmerizing night sky. Add a branch and birds in solid black and a scattering of pink buds to finish a shadow theater display ready for hanging. If you prefer a project the birds will enjoy, make your own birdhouse painting ideas.

24. Enjoy Exotic Blooms

Whip up a screen of luscious hibiscus blossoms and sweet plumeria offset an ocean background in a summer painting idea that shows off the best of nature's beauty!

With a keen eye and a steady hand, you can produce detailed representations of these fantastic flowers in their incredible natural habitat. With lots of fine details, this is a winner of a canvas for painters looking to take their brushwork to the next level.

25. Make Waves

Abstract meets nature art when your summer painting ideas take on the curl of a powerful ocean wave! Make sure your brush follows the curve and pull glassy greens into the arc to give the impression of sunlight shining through the water's thinnest point.

You'll be tempted to grab your surfboard and hit the water once this one hangs on your wall!

26. Lavish Yourself With Lilies

Water lilies are a popular subject for summer painting ideas, and you can put brush to canvas to grow a pond of your very own.

Repetition of overlapping circles in green give you a direct path for clusters of lily pads with a scattering of blooms in fresh pink poised on top. The dark-to-light blend of blues replicates water shaded by overhanging trees, an impeccable composition!

27. Stand Under the Sunflowers

Step-by-step painting with an instructor leading the way will give you a sunflower-filled summer painting idea that emulates the master of Post Impressionism, Vincent Van Gogh.

The presentation is practically an illustration, allowing new painters to get their bearings with confident precision. 

28. Follow the Magic

If you're looking for art ideas for teens who love fantasy, try letting them paint their own enchanted forest. The colorful gradient and glowing fairy lights suggest there's more to this wood than meets the eye.

With storybook trees leading the viewer off the edge of the canvas, the curious will have a banquet of mystery to feast on! 

29. Get a Little Crabby

How about turning out a cheerful crab with your tiniest painters? This summer painting idea sidesteps fine details and outlines for simple shapes and happy colors for an undersea canvas your kiddos will love creating.

With big, shining eyes and a curtain of rising bubbles, the image has enough razzle-dazzle to bring the most reluctant artists out of their shells!

30. Dive Under

Pop art meets cartoon cuteness with a summer painting idea that little creatives will adore! The coloring book style gives painters of all abilities lovable shapes to fill with bright bubblegum colors.

This canvas makes a super fun selection to keep young ones occupied during a summertime sleepover! 

31. Paint and Paint S'more

Toasted marshmallows savored by starlight are the epitome of a sweet summer painting idea. Loose strokes and relaxed brushwork give the image a sense of motion that brings the fire to life.

Add curls of smoke and a smiling sliver of a moon to lighten up the darkness and lend fun details to your image. Real s'mores are a must as a post-painting snack while your canvas dries!

32. Go Chasing Waterfalls

From the star-filled amethyst skies and sleepy purple peaks to the cool blue pool and the cobalt peaks, there's nothing missing from this mystical midnight scene.

But the hero of this summer painting idea is the streaming waterfall that glides over the edge in a blue-silver stream, splashing in soft foam on the surface. It's a layered diorama forged in color that will become the centerpiece of your art space.

33. Create a Whole New World

A mermaid reaching for something beyond the surface becomes a magic-filled summer painting idea that's sure to appeal to fairytale fans!

Though the princess of the tide is in shadow, the reef that surrounds her is loaded with colorful details that provide the most fun for ambitious artists who aren't afraid of a little brushwork. 

Summer painting ideas can be more than just creative fun. For artists hoping to hone their artistic skills, creating an agenda of summer painting ideas that are gradually more challenging will help you grow as you create.

Start simply with summer acrylic painting ideas for beginners to get a proper grip on the medium. This will give you a chance to get a feel for your materials while creating straightforward canvases impressive enough to encourage you onward.

Gradually choose new images that stretch your skills into vibrant new territory. By grabbing opportunities to practice blending, shading, highlighting and adding fine details, you'll find your paintings become more sophisticated as your talent advances.   

The summer may go quickly, but there's plenty of time to find summer painting ideas that help you become a better painter while enjoying a season of unfettered creativity.

By throwing your imagination to the wind and putting as much color as you possibly can on the canvas, the coolest summer painting ideas can be yours to explore.

You'll gain skills to make you a more confident artist, and you'll have an incredible collection of summer art ideas finished in full color by the time the weather changes! 

For even more fun art ideas, check out other experiences happening on Classpop!