Marbleized shaving cream painting

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This was a fun and messy activity inspired by a post at Lessons Learnt Journal {updated: broken link removed}. Let me start by saying that, given my philosophy of prioritizing process over product with preschool age children, we engaged in this activity not so much to have an end product to show off but more to let the kids explore an interesting color and sensory art experience.

To prepare this activity, I gathered some supplies, including:

• A craft tray for each kid to work on
• A can of shaving cream (from the dollar store)
• Six colors of Colorations Liquid Watercolor Paints (we used colors from the tropical colors set)
• Various types of papers cut to multiple sizes
• Tiny plastic cups for holding the liquid water color
• Plastic pipettes for dripping the liquid watercolor on to the shaving cream
• Several objects to marbleize the paints, such as pipe cleaners, toilet paper rolls, and plastic chain pieces
• Index cards and a shower squeegee for scraping the shaving cream off the paper

With these materials in hand, I provided XGirl and QBoy with their own trays and squirted a small amount of shaving cream onto each tray. They immediately went to work adding some liquid watercolors to their shaving cream.

Both kids added quite a few colors to their shaving cream, making for a pretty sight.

After adding the colors, they used various tools to swirl the paint colors. With a little bit of swirling the paint had a marbleized look, like this:

But the kids, being just preschoolers, didn’t want to stop with just a little swirling. 🙂 QBoy, for example, continued swirling until all his pretty colors turned into a big, brown blob. But this was okay by me, because the process was more important than the product. Imagine what he learned by this – that when you mix lots of colors together, they just become brown!

Once the kids had swirled their painted shaving cream to their satisfaction, they dipped their papers into the concoction.

I then scraped off the shaving cream, leaving only the pretty, somewhat marbleized, painted picture. We did a couple rounds of marbleized shaving cream painting, and here were two of our favorites.

Of course, the kids were not content to just make pretty pictures. They also wanted to make a mess, which they promptly did when I was busy scraping the shaving cream from their papers. They just love to get their hands messy!

For both of my kids, getting messy is such an accomplishment. QBoy and XGirl were both very tactile defensive when they joined our family at 1.5 and 2.5 years, respectively, as neither could stand to have dirty hands. QBoy used to have a difficult time at meals because he did not like to get any food on his hands. XGirl hated touching paint or shaving cream when she first came home.  My husband and I have worked hard to help them overcome this so that they will take joy in getting their hands a little dirty in paint, shaving cream, mud, etc.  At this point, as you can tell from this activity, I would say we’ve done our job well. 🙂

More resources for kid-friendly arts and crafts

More arts and crafts from Gift of Curiosity:

• Tape resist watercolor painting
• Coffee filter art
• Crystallized snowflakes
• Upcycled crayons
• Leaf collages
• Glue monsters
• Chromatography flowers craft

Note: For more kid-friendly craft projects, see my Arts and Crafts for Kids page and my Arts and Crafts Pinterest board. 

Follow Katie @ Gift of Curiosity’s board Arts and crafts on Pinterest.

Products used in this post: