Shaving Cream Marbled Paper

Sweet Pea is 45 months old.

From: Long ago I saw this beautiful art project on Blissful Moments (a blog which is now private) and I fell in love with the results.

Material:

• Jelly roll pan or disposable baking tray.
• Another jelly roll pan or cookie sheet.
• Shaving cream.
• 3-4 different colors of liquid water color or food coloring.
• A paintbrush, un-sharpened pencil or something similar to swirl the colors.
• Watercolor paper, card stock or other very heavy paper.
• Pancake turner or cardboard to scrape away the shaving cream.
• A towel to clean up messes.
• A smock or bib for your tot.

Procedure:

• Fill the tray with shaving cream.

• Sprinkle the shaving cream with drops of liquid water color.

• Let your tot use the end of the paintbrush to swirl the colors together.

• Lay a piece of heavy paper over the swirled colors and press it down so that the underside is completely coated.

• Remove the paper from the tray and lay it colored side up on jelly roll pan.
• Allow your tot to use the pancake turner to scrape away the shaving cream.

• Finish scraping off any shaving cream that your tot missed and allow the paper to dry.

Observations: This activity was one of the biggest hits we have had in a while.  Sweet Pea loved it.  I loved it and the marbled paper turned out gorgeous.

The only problem was when we ran out of watercolor paper and I told Sweet Pea that we were done.  She was extremely unhappy and for the rest of the day kept asking, “When can we do the shaving cream again?”

This activity requires quite a bit of parental involvement, but is lots of fun and produces a very nice result.  It is highly recommend for anyone who enjoys art projects.

Notes from the Trenches: This project is messy, but the liquid water colors (which are labeled as “washable”) came off our hands fairly easily.  I doubt food coloring would be so easy to clean up.

The paper needs to be very heavy.  I used regular paper for our first sheet and it ripped when we tried to scrap away the shaving cream.

Also, we never started over with fresh shaving cream.  We just kept adding more liquid watercolors to the top of  what was already in the tray.  The background color on our sheets eventually became a dark purple, but it didn’t hurt the final product; However, I think it helped that I made sure that all our colors were near each other on the color wheel.  If we had used 4 random colors, I think our background might have ended up a ugly brown instead of a rich purple.

Rating: 2 Stars * (Fun, Frugal)