If you’re looking for some mess free painting ideas for kids, try marble painting for kids.
This is how I thought of doing some marble painting for kids: My kids love to paint, and I love it to see them paint, but what a mess you sometimes get! Water splashing on the table, dirty brushes flying around, … and you consider yourself lucky if most of the paint ends up on the paper rather than on the carpet. Sounds familiar? What if you could just have mess-free painting?
I’ve successfully tried and wrote about some other painting ideas for kids using paint brushes that get very close to a mess-free painting experience. But I continued looking for some other painting techniques. I decided to try out something easy, completely different and guess what … mess-free! Are you in? All you need for this crafts activity is a low cardboard box, some marbles, paper and fluid paint to create your own marble painting for kids space.
To prepare and do wome marble painting for kids you need:
- A box and some tape:For the box I used a big cereal box (but any big, wide cardboard box would do) I used some tape to make sure it stays closed, and then cut out one of the the wider sides.
- Sheets of paper, paint and marbles: I put a piece of paper inside, sprayed some paint on the paper and added some marbles in the box.
Victoria(4,5) didn’t need much guidance to figure out how to do marble painting.
By moving the cardboard box, the marbles start to roll through the paint leaving lots of paint marks on the paper.
To continue the fun with marble painting for kids, once a sheet of paper was painted, I took it out and replaced it with a new sheet. This way we got ourselves some funny colored sheets of paper – real art work, don’t you think?
Victoria got so excited that she just had to add “one more” marble to the game – again and again- so we ended up with quite an army of marbles in the box (this taught me that next time we do marble painting for kids I’ll make sure that only few marbles are available).
This was our way of doing marble painting for kids. It was and so much fun that Victoria insisted we couldn’t stop until all the marble paint was over. Luckily I used some small paint containers; otherwise I think she would have painted the whole day!
So….is marble painting for kids mess free painting or not? My answer is YES, provided you agree with your kids on 2 points:
- No hands involved in the marble painting process (first thing Victoria wanted to do)
- Agree not to shake the box too enthusiastically as some full-of-paint-marbles will jump out of the cardboard box leaving color tracks on the carpet (luckily I spotted this fast and cleaned the paint immediately, so I had no stains)
Did you ever try a painting crafts activity like this? If you didn’t try out marble painting for kids and let me know how it went and how your kids liked it. Was it mess-free for you? I am curious 😉
