One of our favourite things to do on sunny spring and summer days is to cover our sidewalks in bright colours and patterns using homemade sidewalk chalk paint.  The paint, which dries with a chalk-looking finish, is vibrant, easy to apply, and washes off with a couple of rains.  Perfect, right?  Almost!  The only {petty} problems are that it’s best used during the warmer, drier months of the year, and the beautiful sidewalk art created cannot be saved in Miss G’s scrapbooks (duh!) 

With both of those things in mind, today we did some experimenting with using the paint on paper!  I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, but I’m happy to report that it worked wonderfully!

First off, after making many batches of sidewalk chalk paint, here is our easy peasy, minimally-messy method of making it.  The key component?  A blender!  First off, it prevents the inevitable cornstarch poof that comes with whisking it, and secondly, I find that after a good long spin in the blender, the cornstarch doesn’t separate from the water nearly as quickly as when we hand mix it.  

With our paints ready, we headed outside with a stack of black construction paper.  I’m sure other papers would work wonderfully too, but I was kind of going for the old-school blackboard look.  Now…  I’m not going to lie.  When we first started using the paints on the paper, I thought our experiment was going to be a total flop.  So much so, in fact, that we ditched the paper and used our entire batch of paint on our front sidewalk instead.  Going on, the paint looked like slightly muddled water… Not quite the look I was hoping for!

It wasn’t until every last drop of our paint was gone and we were beginning to clean up that we noticed how beautiful the paintings we’d banished over to the side were now that they were dry.

Instead of looking wet and barely there like this…

Once dry, they were bright, chalky, and vibrant like this!  Cool, right?  

With that, it was back into the kitchen to whip up another batch of paint.  Together, we painted many more pieces, this time watching the transformation as they dried.

The other kind of cool thing we learned is that once your piece is dry…

You can use your fingernail or the edge of a popsicle stick to scratch off designs and patterns!  Fun, right?

How did our afternoon of painting end? Hah!  Like this!  Miss G was done, dinnertime was nearing, and we still had some paint leftover, so out it went onto the sidewalk.  Of course, which two year old can resist walking through regular puddles, let alone rainbow-coloured ones?! 

Well, and because feet were okay, hands must be okay too, no?

♥ 

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