What Can I Do with a Stony Face Painted on Rocks?

Once you paint a Stony Face on rocks, you'll find many ways to have fun with him (or her). Here's one example.

We all have refrigerators and many of us use refrigerator magnets. Parents love to showcase their child's artwork on the fridge. Children love to do craft projects that they can proudly display.

A painted rock Stony Face can become refrigerator magnets. Eyes up, eyes down, eyes crossed. You and/or your children can express yourself on a refrigerator's canvas by rearranging the eye, nose and mouth features of the Stony Face.

Stony Faces on Refrigerators

Need guidance on How to Paint Stony Face on Rocks? There's a PDF version and a Kindle eBook version that instruct and illustrate how four basic eye and mouth patterns enable you to make over 100 facial combinations to have fun with.

Rock Painting How-To Guide Now Available for Amazon's Kindle Ebook Reader

Click here for the Kindle version.

The Kindle version of the craft painting book, How to Paint a Stony Face on Rocks, includes access to a full-size, full-color, printable PDF version of this project which can be downloaded to any computing device for easy printing. 

This is an easy, rock painting project for both kids and adults using ordinary stones and acrylic paint.


© Cindy Thomas Painted Rocks

Hand Painted Rocks Become Stony Faces

I recently had some fun painting simple facial features on various sizes of rocks and stones. I called my new creation Stony Face.

Stony Face Painted on Rocks

I then had an idea and even more fun rearranging the eye and mouth rocks I painted to create five additional funny Stony Faces.

5 Different Stony Faces from 1 Set of Painted Rocks

Then I was inspired to paint more detailed mouths on some rocks and ended up with these LOL rocks that I could use with the basic Stony Face from my earlier project.

LOL Painted Rocks for Stony Face

Finally, I decided to record all the steps I took to create the basic Stony Face, added 3 more simple eye and mouth patterns, and made a Stony Face rock painting how-to guide.

How to Paint a Stony Face on Rocks

The Stony Face craft project is easy enough for beginner rock painters. Simple, step-by-step instructions, illustrations and photos guide you in selecting the rocks, drawing and painting the mouth and eyes, and arranging your painted rocks into funny faces. The 4 basic mouth patterns and 4 simple eye patterns can be combined to create over 100 unique, one-of-a-kind Stony Faces.

This is an easy, fun, inexpensive, craft project for both kids and adults. It's amazing how a little acrylic paint and imagination can bring ordinary rocks to life.

© Cindy Thomas Painted Rocks

Painted Rocks are Less Messy with the Help of These Cheap Household Items

In addition to the basic supplies used when I hand paint rocks, I've discovered these inexpensive household items make rock painting a little easier and less messy.

My vinyl tablecloth

Vinyl tablecloth - A vinyl tablecloth is always placed over my painting table to catch drips and messes from the painted rocks. Clean up is easy and the tablecloths are so inexpensive that I don't mind throwing them away when necessary. These are available at dollar and discount stores.

Lazy Susan found at a thrift store

Lazy Susan - This once-popular household item has been invaluable to me because rocks can be placed on the lazy Susan and rotated as I paint all the sides. It can be very difficult (and messy) holding a rock and painting it and a lazy Susan easily solves that problem. I acquired my lazy Susan at the local thrift store for just a few bucks and it even included the glass serving dishes which could be used as washable, paint palettes.


Plastic Coffee Container - The large Maxwell House coffee container (30+ ounces) is perfect for holding water for brush rinsing. The built-in handle helps me avoid spills when I'm carrying the container back and forth from the sink to my painting table. The hollow handle is also great for keeping smaller brushes upright while they're soaking in the rinse water. There are other plastic, coffee containers but none have a handle quite like Maxwell House's. I'm a coffee drinker so this household item was free for me.

Container, brush, lid, toothpicks, soap

Fingernail Brush - For scrubbing the rocks before being painted, an old or inexpensive fingernail brush from the dollar/discount store works beautifully. (The plastic coffee container mentioned above is a perfect container for soaking and sanitizing rocks, too).



Plastic Lids - Lids from plastic food containers are useful as paint palettes. I use larger lids for rocks that require more colors to be mixed and the smaller lids for more simply-colored rocks. The lids are also useful for holding a small amount of Mod Podge when I'm ready to apply a sealer to the rock. This keeps me from dipping my brush into the large bottle of Mod Podge and contaminating it.


Toothpicks - This inexpensive household item found at grocery/discount stores is useful for clearing the tips of clogged paint bottles and for keeping a small rock upright when applying paint details.


Bar Soap - I use inexpensive bar soap to clean my brushes. I dip the wet brush onto the bar soap and swish it around, pushing the brush into the soap to get all the bristles clean. I then rinse the brush thoroughly. (Now you know what to do with all the small bar soaps you've collected on your travels.)


Keeping yourself, your kids, and your rock painting area neat and clean is not difficult or expensive when you enlist the aid of items readily available in your home.


© Cindy Thomas Painted Rocks

Color Inspiration for Hand Painted Rocks

I recently came across this wonderful book containing more than 3,000 innovative color palettes including a CD with 3,286 downloadable swatch files. It's called "Color Inspirations."

Color theory is explained but what I found much more helpful were palettes for red, red-orange, orange, orange-yellow, yellow, yellow-green, green, green-blue, blue, blue-violet, violet, violet-red, pink, brown and grey.

Each page features 18 palettes for the color harmonies (monochromatic, analogous, triadic, split-complementary, complementary and other) of each color mentioned above, along with the CMYK, RGB, and HEX code to recreate the palette.

Here's a sample of what I'm talking about featuring the color green (in honor of St. Patrick's Day) and 6 palettes from each page:

Green - Monochromatic

Green - Analogous

Green - Triadic

Green - Split Complementary

Green - Complementary

Green - Other

When I'm having a difficult time choosing colors for painting my rocks, I refer to "Color Inspirations" and discover color combinations I'd never thought of using before.

Since I love bright colors, just thumbing through the book brings me joy and delight and sparks my creativity.