P colonies, tissue-like P systems with very simple components, have received constant attention from the membrane computing community and in the last years several new variants of the model have been considered. Another P system model, namely kernel P system, integrating the most successfully used features of membrane systems, has recently attracted interest and some important developments have been reported. In this paper we study connections among several classes of P colonies and kernel P systems, by showing how the behaviour of these P colony systems can be represented as kernel P systems. An example illustrates the way it is modelled by using P colonies and kernel P systems and some properties of it are formally proved in the latter approach.