It's a well known fact that our son does not like to get his hands dirty! They even mentioned it as his pre-school - so a while back we thought we'd try and persuade him with some messy marbling fun.
He ended up creating this wonderful pattern - and had a lot of fun in the process.
Finley's big sisters were out for the day, so we had time to ourselves to get on with some serious art.
You will need:
Shaving cream
A tray (a disposable foil tray would be best)
Different colour acrylic paints (we used four)
A cocktail stick
A spatula or ruler
Paper towels
Paper
1. Squirt the shaving cream into a tray, we used an old paint roller tray with some foil in the bottom. As long as it's big enough to fit your paper in it doesn't really matter what you use. Fin had great fun smooshing it about. Next put different colour paint blobs in, we used red, pink, blue and yellow. A few dots of each colour is perfect!
2. Then, to marble! We used a cocktail stick to swirl the paint about in the cream, but any thing would do. I have read that this also works using food colouring instead of paint too. Keep swirling until you're happy with the pattern.
3. Take a sheet of paper, a thicker paper like cartridge paper would work best, but we only had plain printing paper, then lay the paper on top of the cream and press down gently.
Next lift the paper off and scrape off the excess cream, it's best to scrape it off on a flat surface, so lay the paper down flat and scrape sideways with a spatula or ruler (we used a piece of cardboard). Dab off any excess with kitchen paper towels and leave to dry. Fin then spent a good 20 minutes playing with the shaving cream, he looked like a Smurf afterwards - but I think he's over the messy hands thing!
It was very messy, so if you can do it outdoors, I'd say that's a far better option, but he created some pretty awesome art.
