Driveway Paint

The colors picked by Little Guy

We made sidewalk paint!  But since it's soooo sunny and HOT, we decided to call it driveway paint!  (we have a 2 foot section of shade in the driveway where the roof hangs over our canvas).  It was super easy to make, even a 5 year old can do it!

Ingredients and Directions:
1 cup cornstarch
1 cup water
A bowl to mix it in
Several small cups (or a muffin tin- or both like we used)
Paintbrushes that can be abused on the rough surface of the sidewalk/driveway
Food coloring
Extra water

First you want to mix the cornstarch and water in a bowl:

Stirring, stirring!

As you can see this takes tremendous skill and concentration!  It won't get thick like it does on the stovetop, it just looks like watery milk.  The more you let your child stir it, the more fun it becomes; no harm done!






Next you want to put your white "paint" into separate containers so it can be colored.  We used small clear cups inside a muffin tin (I didn't want to dye my muffin tin and it also provided support to carry the cups).  Bonus: the cups are recyclable, so when we become bored of making paint (UNLIKELY!), we can just toss them in the recycle bin (one of little man's chores- a post on that another day!)  Add several drops of food coloring to get your desired shade of color.  If you want to mix primary colors to get other colors, here's a guide in case you forgot:
yellow+blue= green
red+blue= purple
red+yellow= orange
Don't forget to leave a cup empty and put that extra water in it, so that the brushes can be cleaned in between colors!

Sitting on our shady canvas ready to paint!

Final step:
Have fun painting!!!  This was sooo cool.  When it dries, the "paint" looks just like bright chalk!  It's been a few days since we painted, and our paintings are still there!  I'm sure the next rain will wash it away, but until then we enjoy looking at our masterpieces every time we go outside!

Painting a picture of a leaf

An apple

Painting an actual leaf (it didn't stick, paint just ran off leaf)

Mommy's creation :)

This of course was not an original idea of mine... I get most of my creative inspiration from Pinterest.  The original source can be found here (at least that's where I pinned it from!)

Update 06/16/2012: It rained yesterday!  Not surprising, I know, with summer being here and all, but I wanted to let you all know that our paintings disappeared with the rain.  We didn't even have to help it along because the rain was steady enough to wash it all away :)  I guess we'll just have to make more paint! {insert sarcastic "darn!" here}