Coloured shaving foam paint tray.

The kids love playing with shaving foam. It’s slippery and squishy, but it’s also easy to clean up. We’ve used shaving foam in its plain white form straight from the can plenty of times. A quite likes the noise it makes as it comes out of the can. Last week I added some yellow food colouring to the shaving foam in a tray for A to play with. She got it all over herself, and ended up actually hopping into the tray to squish it between her toes. Watching her play with the coloured foam gave me the idea to paint with it. So today I used a muffin tray as a makeshift paint tray, and put shaving foam into each hole. I added food colouring and mixed it thoroughly.

Sharing the shaving foam paint tray.

A brush for each colour and we were set. L painted a rainbow with grass, a sun, and a stream. Predictably, A just smeared the paint around on her piece of paper, and then started mixing all the colours together. We have so many brown paintings done by A.

L painting a pink love heart.

The coloured foam went on the paper nicely with a sort of puffy texture. The colours lightened a little as it dried, and the large clumps of foam became crumbly, but we’re still very happy with the result. The food colouring stained the kids’ fingers (and hands, legs, faces, hair…) a little, but most of it washed off in the tub. And the rest will fade. Since we did this activity outside on the tarp, I just rinsed the brushes at the end, and washed out the tray and clean up was done.

A hard at work on her painting.