How To Make Puffy Paint

I hope you are ready to level up your painting game! Recently I made this puffy paint with my toddler group and it was about the neatest thing ever, I would like to show you how to make your own puffy paint too.

Don’t forget to grab your ice cream cone print out later in the post!

What Is Puffy Paint

Puffy paint is a super cool alternative to regular paint that you can make at home. It is exactly what it is called, puffy! With just 3 ingredients you can make this simple yet intriguing new paint to bring texture into your painting exploration.

The best part about making this yourself, you can make all kinds of different colors!

Prepping Your Space

I decided to set our items in a shallow plastic bin for this project as I wasn’t quite sure I would get their ice cream paintings off the cardboard box if it began to dry.

The half sheets for our ice cream template fit perfect in these bins if you want to check them out for yourself. We use them all the time for things like beading, playdough, manipulatives etc.

What’s In Your Clean Up Kit?

Because of the stickiness of this project and…well…one-year-olds…I would highly recommend keeping both wet wipes and a washcloth for each child on hand.

I only had one younger toddler stray and touch the top of his head with the blue puffy paint covered paint brush (it was my kid, it’s always my kid) and he did end up with a blue spot for a couple days even post bath.

What You Need

Materials:

¼ cup Shaving Cream
¼ cup white glue
Food coloring
Paint brush
Container to mix paint
- We used disposable cups I had from the dollar store.
Card stock
- We used regular printer paper and while it worked, cardstock would have been so much better
Print out of ice cream cone template (optional)

I highly recommend you check out this pack of coloring. It is affordable and comes with tons of colors.

What We Did

You’re going to want to mix equal parts shaving cream and white glue. If you can’t get this part exact, it’s okay! This project is pretty forgiving regarding the amounts.

We started off by adding approximately 1/4^th cup shaving cream to the bowl
Next add 1/4^th cup of white glue
Now you will want to add your coloring. I started with 10 drops of each color and added more if I thought it was needed. Keep in mind, the colors will darken a bit as they dry!
Mix it up! We used little wooden appetizer sticks but I would also recommend using popsicle sticks.
Time to paint!!

I gave my toddler group the choice of what color they wanted to make their ice cream then we rotated with the brown cone color.

Because this was a new form of paint, I had the children try the paint out before I talked about this compared to the regular paints we use.

I then showed the kids that we can ‘glob’ it a bit more than regular paint.

They quickly caught on to how they should paint with this.

We also talked about this not being a fingerpaint day.

Remember what I said about my kid and his blue spotted head above.

Ours ended up a little thick, I think a little more shaving cream would have been good as well.

Once dry, cut out the ice cream cone parts and have your littles help glue them together.

The End Results

Their finished project sure looks delicious!

Ways To Learn

As always this is an amazing opportunity to talk about colors.

We can also discuss texture.

Let the kids try out the paint first, then talk about how it puffs up to make dimensional paint.

It’s okay to use big words with little kids. Just explain what it means…then have them repeat the word because there’s not much better then little kids trying to say big words.

Take some of the left-over paint and add it to a sheet of paper for the kids to touch and poke when it’s all dry.

Talk about how it feels, how regular paint feels compared to this type of paint.

You could even let the kids help mix the paint.

Hand-Eye Coordination

Painting requires coordination between the eyes and hands. Toddlers learn to control their hand movements while dipping their brush and transferring the paint to their project. If using an outline, some may even begin to think about painting and tracing the lines.

Takeaway Tips

Colored puffy paint will potentially stain the top of the children’s head (we found this to be true)
Remember this is sticky, consider moving the papers around occasionally as your littles paint if they’re getting stuck to your table cover
Talk about texture and what that means
Once you have completed your project, dispose of the remaining puffy paint. We have found that it doesn’t last
This project would be fun for kids of all ages
You could also try putting your paint in plastic squeeze bottles rather than painting

Don’t forget to grab your ice cream cone printable and if you’re new to messy art with toddlers, check out this article and consider grabbing my beginners guide to messy art with toddlers at the end of this post.

Click here for your free Ice Cream Cone Download