Painted Rocks

About a year ago I found a local rock painting group through Facebook that paints rocks and then hides them around the community for people to find.  It's a good will type of action meant to bring a smile to someone's face or delight a child.  The finders of the rocks can keep them, leave them where they found them, or hide them someplace else for someone else to find.  The rocks are labeled with the group's name, the artist's name, and instructions to post a picture of the rock to our page on Facebook so that the artist knows that his or her work was found, and hopefully appreciated.

I liked the idea for a lot of reasons.  First off, it was a small, but positive way to make an impact on people.  For those who like to find the rocks, it feels like Easter every day.  My family has always had a lot of fun organizing and participating in Easter egg hunts.  We often found candies from past hunts at unexpected times, but most often when we cleaned house or moved furniture.  The kids would be talking about it for weeks afterward, because it was always special to find a treasure when you weren't even looking for one.

I find painting rocks to be relaxing.  I can make mistakes and no one cares, because it's not on a $100 canvas with expensive oil paints, but just a rock and a 99 cent bottle of acrylic.  Plus, if I make a mistake, it's easy enough to cover up with the next layer of paint.

Around the time I found the group, I was at the beginning of my battle with arthritis along the right side of my body.  I needed to exercise every day or my leg would lock up and I'd be crippled.  However, I was bored taking walks near my home, and this group gave me the incentive to get my exercise at local parks so that I could look for painted rocks along the way, and hide my latest batch as well.  So, rock painting has become my most recent craft of interest.  Here are a few photos of some rocks I've painted in the past.

What's really fun is when some rock I painted months ago that disappeared suddenly shows up in circulation again.  We call those "recycled rocks".  People find them and keep them to enjoy and show around for a while, and then they put them back out into the community for someone else to find.