At Alexandria’s Art on the Avenue, a child’s festival menu could include drawing by scraping rather than coloring in. Del Ray Artisans described an all-ages scratchboard activity for Oct. 3: visitors could choose a butterfly shape, a Halloween-themed design or a rectangle and work at their own pace. The group said the tent would be drop-in, with supplies available while they lasted and donations appreciated. A handout was planned to show families how to make scratchboards at home.
The accompanying photograph is a general Pexels stock image of children making art; it is illustrative, not documentation of Art on the Avenue.
The listing also offered older children a way to experiment with technique. It named stippling, hatching and cross-hatching as ways to suggest texture on the board. Those are small choices with a visible result: a child could try a repeated mark, a set of lines or a crossed pattern and see how each changed a drawing. The description gave families an idea of the activity before arriving, while leaving the project open-ended rather than prescribing one finished picture.
That scratchboard tent was one part of the Kids Art Corner, a free area where local organizations bring their own projects to the festival. Art on the Avenue says nonprofits have hosted free art activities there for 30 years. Its 2026 participant poster lists 19 organizations, ranging from schools and arts groups to community organizations. Instead of one central craft lesson, the posted program offered a collection of separate tables and demonstrations.
The poster included familiar art-making alongside the scratchboard idea. Encore Stage & Studio listed puppet-making, Del Ray United Methodist Church listed Kindness Rocks, and Titan Robotics advertised a robot demonstration. UpCycle Creative Reuse Center listed upcycled bag charms. These examples show the variety in the posted program without suggesting every attendee tried every activity. The poster records planned offerings; it does not say how many children stopped at each table or which projects ran out first.
The scratchboard listing gave the activity a deliberately flexible format: families could arrive during its three-hour window, join without a set start time and move through the project at their own pace. Supplies were available while they lasted. Donations were appreciated, but the Kids Art Corner itself was advertised as free. For parents moving among a festival’s many stops, a short, self-paced project can fit between other plans more easily than a class that requires advance registration or a fixed start time.
The Kids Art Corner was scheduled for 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Mount Vernon Recreation Center field, alongside the larger Oct. 3 neighborhood festival. Art on the Avenue’s organizer describes the corner as a long-running festival feature. The poster gives each participating group room to name its own activity, while the individual scratchboard listing supplies more detail about one project’s format, age range and take-home instructions. Together, the materials show how the area was planned: many small invitations to make something, rather than a single stage program.
The scratchboard activity also included a planned way for families to continue exploring the technique later. Del Ray Artisans said its handout would explain how to make scratchboards at home. If families tried the project, the guide could help them revisit it after the festival. The listing does not say what supplies a home version required, so the useful promise is the instruction sheet itself, not a claim that families could reproduce the project in a particular way.
The event took place during a rainy day, according to independent post-event coverage. The Alexandria Brief reported on Oct. 4 that thousands attended despite the rain and that children participated in activities on the recreation-center field. It also reported that hundreds of artists displayed and sold work along Mount Vernon Avenue. The account establishes that the children’s activity area was part of the day; it does not identify the scratchboard tent specifically or report what any individual child made.
That distinction leaves a clear picture of both the plan and the evidence. The organizer’s pages document a free, nonprofit-led Kids Art Corner, and the poster records a 19-group menu that included scratchboard, puppets, kindness rocks, reuse crafts and robotics. Del Ray Artisans’ detailed listing describes one self-paced, all-ages project and its take-home handout. Independent coverage confirms children’s activities at the field during the rain-day festival, while stopping short of verifying individual booths. The result is a neighborhood arts event with a practical, low-pressure invitation for young visitors to make something of their own.
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