Ice Painting is Colorful Fun

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Ice painting is a fantastic way to let your child’s creative juices flow and keep all that creativity flowing ON the paper. With ice painting, you have an easy, fairly mess free outlet for creativity, color, and imagination.

Ice Painting – Picasso Creativity without the Pollack Floor

With the frigid temps this week, we have been trapped in the house and doing all sorts of fun projects (and some not so fun projects-like organizing the kitchen cabinets)

You read about our bubble wrap printing yesterday, and today I’m sharing another fun painting technique! Ice Painting!!

A few weeks ago Avery brought home an ice painting from school. In her class they used food coloring. I wanted to try this at home, but I really hate working with food coloring, because even when it’s diluted, it still stains!!! I wanted to see if I could make it work with washable kid’s paint!  Spoiler Alert: IT WORKED!!

Supplies:

• Kid’s Paint/Poster Paint
• Ice cube tray filled with water
• Lollipop or popsicle sticks

Step 1: Using a paintbrush, add paint to each cup and mix.

Step 2: Add your sticks, and pop the tray in the freezer. (I recommend you do this the night before, Avery was not super patient while waiting for the paint cubes to freeze!)

Step 3: Get to painting!!

I recommend using a heavier stock, or watercolor style paper.

Avery loved this painting technique! It’s just different enough to make it seem extra special! She liked experimenting with how the colors bleed together to create different colors!

The colors stayed pretty vibrant as the water didn’t dilute them as much as with food coloring. Clean-up is easy! Since it’s not food coloring, I wasn’t worried about her staining her clothes (you can see she got some on her pajamas!)

It was a fun project that taught her a bit about science (mixing the paint & water, freezing the cubes) art (obviously!) and worked on those all important fine motor skills (holding the paint cubes and drawing/painting with them) A great project for preschoolers!! Have you ever painted with ice? For another fun art activity, check out our Bubble Wrap Printing post!