My kids have spent a lot of time painting. It's sort of our go to, I'm bored, rainy afternoon thing. However in all our painting endeavors we have somehow never actually finger painted. Well, officially, most of our painting does involve some finger painting, but we have never used just fingers and finger paints. However I think finger painting is a great sensory experience for kids so when I saw a recipe for making your own finger paints from Easie Peasie I thought we would give it a try.
The paints were very simple to make. We mixed 3 tablespoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 cup of cornstarch and 2 cups of water in a saucepan. Like our other corn starch based art materials the mix was very watery and after a few minutes of stirring over medium-high heat the mix quickly thickened to the consistency of pudding. After the mix thickened up I took the pan off the heat and let it cool down a little before dividing it up into 4 small bowls. The Bee then helped me mix a few drops of food coloring into each bowl. She decided she wanted to make pink, yellow, turquoise and blue so those are the 4 colors we mixed. I put a little bit of each color onto plastic plates, one for each of the girls and then gave them the plates with a large sheet of paper. It's funny how kids never act how you expect them to. When I was making the paint I was sure that the Bean, who is almost 2 and always up for a good mess would be way more excited about it then her sister. However, The Bean only painted for a few minutes before she wanted to get down and wash her hands. The Bee,who is sometimes a little weird about messy hands, was all about the paints. She dove right in and was smearing, mushing and blending away. The paints have a thicker gelatinous consistency that make them fun to squish. I put the extra paint into a few small plastic containers with screw top lids to keep them from drying out. They seem to be holding up well, we have used them a few times and they are still working great!
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