Got shaving cream, school glue and flour? Then you can make the BEST puffy paint EVER! The best part about DIY puffy paint is that it is great for all ages. Younger children can mix and paint with thier hands and older children can put it into squeeze bottles and make intricate patterns and drawings. If you don't have squeeze bottles, a pastry bag or plastic bag works great (But is a little bit harder to control!). Lucy mostly used her hands but I tested out all of the other methods myself (and had just as much fun as she did!).
Our puffy paint art project took most of the morning and we had so much fun. I originally planned on making more than one color but Lucy was content with just one. The older the children are, the more fun multiple colors in bottles would be!
Want to try it out? Here's how we did it!
I went looking for recipes online and found this one on numerous mama sites. We were impressed!
3/4 cup shaving cream
1/4 cup white glue
1/4 cup flour
Food Coloring
I put all of the ingredients onto the coffee table and Lucy got to work. It's a little messy, but I love to let her mix ingredients for our DIY projects. It's a math lesson, fine motor practice and makes her feel accomplished all in one. Win, win, win.
Mix, mix mix all of the ingredients together in a big bowl.
After the glue, shaving cream and flour are thoroughly mixed, separate the paint into smaller portions (or not) to add your color(s)! If you want, you can put the "paint" into plastic bags with a drop or two of food coloring and let your kids mix, mix, mix, with their hands. It's GOOSHY and feels awesome! We stirred this time and Lu chose green because it's Dada's favorite color! :)
I was going to put the paint into a squeeze bottle, but she dove right in and started finger paiting. I grabbed a paint brush and she went back and forth between brush and hands, exploring the texture and how it moved on the paper.
The best part of this puffy paint is that it really dries puffy (I promise!). It's a great activity to keep them busy, busy, busy and the older kids will love bottle painting with it. If you try it out, let us know! I have a feeling we are going to be doing this activity, A LOT!
Want to shop this post? The links below are amazon affiliate links, meaning, if you clickity over to amazon and purchase something, I receive a small commission at no cost to you. Any compensation from the link goes right into Lucy's warrior fund to help us, help her, battle retinoblastoma. You can follow along on her journey using her hashtag, #lucythewarrior on facebook and instagram. xoxo
Our favorite gel food coloring It took me a really long time to finally buy this food coloring and I am so glad I did! I use way less and there are so many beautiful color options in the package.
Shaving cream (we used barbasol)
School Glue (we have a ginormous bottle of elmers!) because it makes way more sense for things like this!
