Puffy Paint or Drip Paint

Notice that the cereal boxes/cardboard will leave a weepy water stain.

It dries up a little puffy and slightly glittery from the salt.

Now that Cheeky is officially two, I wanted to use this summer to do more art projects geared for her. She's so into the sensory stage and all...

Yesterday, we did painting with puffy paint. I got the recipe from First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos by MaryAnne Kohl which is an excellent activity/art book but you can find a similar recipe with many helpful tips from Jean of The Artful Parent.

Ingredients for Puffy Paint: (for three children and five bottles total was more than enough. I think we could have just did 1.5 cups)

2 c flour
2 c water
2 c salt (experiment with both Kosher and cheapo salt (think Aldi) for a little variety in the glitter factor)


You will also need:
-hand mixer

-funnel

-empty and clean shampoo, ketchup, and any "squeezable bottle." The Artful Parent used icing bags. I also purchased some cheap generic condiment bottles from the dollar store for this purpose. I ended up using five bottles total for red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

-tempera paint (it's really fun to have some metallic silver and gold paint to blend into different shades. We used metallic gold to make orange with the leftover yellow, and it turned out beautifully.)

-thick cardboard, preferably with sides or cut-up cereal boxes are okay, but you might want to double them. If you want to avoid water stains, Jean recommends foam board or white cardstock.

Directions:

Use a hand mixer to make a lump-free liquid. Then divide mixture into separate bowls and add tempera paint until you have the desired shade. I tried tempera powder this time, but you have to mix a lot to get the lumps out so tempera paint seems to be the way to go.

Kids can help with using the hand mixer and mixing the colors. They can also hold the funnel as you pour the liquid into separate bowls and mix in tempera paint until you obtain the desired shade.

When you're done, you can refrigerate them up to a week (shake before use) and wash the bottles for more future fun!

Surprisingly, Cheeky either has difficulty or doesn't like squeezing! She just put the bottles upside down and did drip art.


Koko no longer squeezes with abandon. She's very careful and deliberate.

Only J was enthusiastic about squeezing. Koko was getting concerned that he was squeezing all of it out! I left all the leftover paint for him. For kids like him, thick cardboard is a must! His previous work was overflowing with the paint mix!