Homemade Finger Paints

I was fortunate enough to watch my nephew again today. I love spending time with him. I treasure the time I get to spend with him. And, as usual, we jumped right into a project. Today, we decided, was a good day for making homemade finger paints. 

My nephew is 8 years old and my son is nearing on 2 years old, so finding something they both may enjoy can be a bit of a challenge, but we did it! 

The link for the blog with this picture is: http://sheridanfrench.blogspot.com/2012/01/homemade-finger-paints.html

Image via Pinterest

My nephew helped me put all of the ingredients into a pot and turned the burner on low. He thought it looked very much like milk...with a far saltier smell.

I heard (afterwards) that it is best to stir it continuously and probably with a whisk. However, since I didn't hear it until afterwards, I regrettably did not follow this rule. Rather, a song from the Muppets came on my Pandora radio station, so my boys and I just had to dance it out. Once our dance break was over, I came back to find my pot of paint base almost in a rolling boil (not what you want to have happen) and a bit lumpy. Thankfully, it still worked just fine. This shows you how lumpy it was, but it was still useable. Yay! 

After the base cooled pretty much completely, we put our food coloring into some tupperware and started mixing. I am ever-so grateful that this was safe if ingested finger paints, because when my son asked for a spoon, we (naturally) assumed he wanted to help mix up some of the paints. Wrong. He immediately took a giant bite out of the paint and had a beautiful yellow hue to his lovely red lips. He spit it out as quickly as he had taken it in and all is well. How silly of me to think that he'd like to stir it, especially when I give him one of his spoons. Lesson learned, dear son. Lesson learned. 

After we mixed all the ingredients, we went to work on the painting fun. 

The boys had a blast painting with their fingers. Well, Gabriel did. Cade didn't like getting "dirty" and kept wanting to wipe off the paint from his fingers. I think once he tries it out a little more, he'll probably really enjoy it.

The one thing I noticed was, because it was lumpy, the paint had some lumps in it that weren't drying very quickly, however, they do still dry...kind of like a 3D painting! Ooooh. It was so neat to see something so easy paint and dry on our lovely canvas. So fun! I'd highly recommend making your own paint for your little ones. Especially if they are like mine and eat anything that has a spoon in it.