Home-made Finger Paint

I got a cool recipe online (my aunt posted it on her facebook, and then I saw it another couple times since as well on a few different sites), so I thought we'd give it a try today. Wee Man has a horrible cold (again), so I thought we'd stay inside today rather than letting the cold air aggravate his cough further...

Here's the recipe:

Home-made Finger Paint
3 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup corn starch
2 cups water
* Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and warm until the mixture begins to thicken. Pour into containers, use food colouring if desired and let cool before painting!

I used neon food colouring to get some of the cool colours and then a regular red and yellow (although my neon orange - top left - in this picture looks about the same as the red colouring) just to give us some funkier colours to play with.

The kids absolutely loved playing with the finger paints and making a huge mess in the process! haha. This is definitely not a clean activity....and the finger paints did dye their skin slightly as well. I have two kids sitting eating snack beside me here with tinted blue hands (that seemed to be the colour that stayed behind on skin...)!



So overall a fun activity - nice to find a recipe that makes finger paints inexpensively with things I have on hand in the kitchen! I think I might stick to the lighter colours next time just to avoid the blue-tinted hands (or does anyone have a dye recommendation that won't leach onto skin?) and we'll file this recipe as one to keep!