It’s super easy to make and the texture is so neat! I love that it’s just 3 simple ingredients:
- Shaving Cream
- White School Glue
- Food Colouring
Mix equal amounts of shaving cream and white glue until you have the texture you want.
I used Barbasol shaving cream from the dollar store, but I’m sure any type would work. And I bought a big bottle of generic white glue from Walmart.
Pour a generous amount of the white glue into a small bowl or container.
Add an equal amount of shaving cream to the bowl. Just guess with it. You can’t really mess it up. I think I added too much shaving cream, but it still turned out.
Add a few drops of food colouring to the mixture. Keep in mind, that as the puffy paint dries, the colour will get darker, so don’t be too worried if it looks too light at this point. I added about 10 to 15 drops of food colouring into each of our colours.
I really didn’t want this stuff on our kitchen spoons, so I used straws to stir them all up. A stir stick or popsicle stick would work well too.
Repeat the process for as many colours as you’d like. I’m not sure what I did differently to the pink puffy paint below, but it looks like it has a better texture compared to the others. I think it had more glue in it?
Since I wanted to make a rainbow, we made lots of colours and even made a bowl of plain white for the puffy clouds. As far as painted clouds go, you really can’t get a better cloud texture than this!
You’ll need to add a generous amount of puffy paint to your paper. Isn’t it cool how textured it is?
And then when it dried, the colours were way darker.
After it dried, the girls kept wanting to poke it with their fingers to feel the texture. None of us could resist the cool foaminess!
After we finished the rainbows, we painted a bunch of balloons.
I started by drawing the strings with black pen, and then generously dolloped a big circle of paint on the end of each string to make the balloons.
When it dried, it had the coolest spongy texture.
This is what it looked like a couple hours later. Still lots of depth!
My girls loved it. They loved mixing all the colours and experimenting with how it looked on different colours of construction paper. The effect was pretty cool on black paper!
I’m definitely going to try adding more glue the next time I make this paint. I’m really curious to see how it changes the texture!
Seriously though, aren’t those clouds amazing?! This homemade puffy paint was such a fun and EASY craft for the kids to do! They loved the texture and had so much fun mixing everything together! With three simple ingredients, you can keep the kids entertained for hours!
If you’re looking for more fun kids activities, check out our recipe for marshmallow play dough. This has to be the easiest play dough recipe I’ve ever made and it’s completely safe to taste test!
PS - Here's a list of my favourite link parties.
I am always looking for something fun and different that I can do with my kiddos! Love this! Thanks so much for sharing!
I had no idea that puffy paint was so easy to make! Pinned so I can’t find it again later. 🙂 (visiting from WFMW)
This is awesome! Thank you for this! I like doing easy crafts with my nieces and nephews. They will love this!
This is cool. I’m pinning this for my nephews…fun craft.
Can I use acrylic paint instead of food colouring? Will it work?
It depends how concentrated the acrylic paint is? If it takes a ton of paint to get the right colour, then it could mess up the consistency. I’ve never tried with acrylic, so I can’t say for sure. If you do try, let us know!
oh thanks! sure i will=)
Would this work with squirty cream rather than shaving foam? (For my younger children who will try and eat it!)
I haven’t tried that, but I doubt it would work very well. But with kids, it’s about the process, so if you make a mess with squirty cream and the kids have fun with it, then go for it!
This is fantastic! How long would you say they last and stay fluffy? thanks!
They stay pretty fluffy for about a day, and then they start to flatten out. We only kept ours for about 3 days. The glue gives it a bit of texture, but definitely not as much as on the first day. Hope that helps!
I used tempura dry paint and mix with a little water and some dish soap ( any kind of dish soap). I wonder if you could add shaving foam to the dry tempura paint and a little dish soap if that would work.(the dish soap is to protect the little ones clothes/ when clothes are washed, paint will wash out. I used this recipe when my children were young and now I use it for my Grandchildren
While I really love your projects, I hate how many pop-up ads assault me. Every single I would close one, another would float across the screen. I know bloggers have to make money, but this can’t be the only way, can it? I counted EIGHT in the time that I ended up ravenously scrolling down to get what I needed from this post.
Can i use puffy paint on cendelles too or there is another ideas
how washable is it…or will it stain everything…we dont have a backyard so all our messy crafts happen inside so i have to be careful
It’s made with food colouring, so yes, it could stain things. We did it at our kitchen table with a dollar store table cloth over top. I found it was a really easy clean up. But my kids (who were 3 and 5 at the time) aren’t the type of kids who get paint all over themselves, so it really depends how messy your kids are.
Does the paint store well in airtight containers or does it need to be made and used in the same day?
I’ve never tried to store it, but my gut tells me that you need to use it the same day. I’m guessing the bubbles in the shaving cream foam would probably pop and the mixture would basically turn into runny glue if you try to store it.