Use common household items to make your own face paint this Halloween. Let creativity soar when you create a ton of face paint colors and let your kids take hold of the brush. Who knows? It might just inspire a Halloween costume!
Sensory guide: See • Touch • Smell
Set-up time mid
Clean-up time high
Mess factor high
As parents of small children, we spend an excessive amount of time wiping mess from clothes and faces. Why not simply embrace the chaos by opening a new world of artistic expression and play through self-face-painting? And, when they have exhausted the canvas of their own faces, reverse the roles and let the children paint you. Have them take control and marvel in the hilarity of everyone looking dorky. Make sure you take lots of pictures, too.
This could just as easily be an indoor play activity but, just to be on the safe side, take it outside if you can. The less need to say “no,” the better for everyone.
YOU WILL NEED
plain moisturizer or body cream (not your finest eye serum)
an ice tray
a chopstick
cornflour
several colors of food coloring
paint brushes
a mirror
Put a little moisturizer into as many ice tray compartments as you are planning on coloring. Use the chopstick to mix in a little cornflour at a time. You want to thicken the mixture to a firm, paint-like consistency. If it’s too runny, add more cornflour; if too lumpy, add more moisturizer.
Drop a different food color into each compartment, remembering that natural colors require more, so you may need more cornflour to keep it paint-like.
Give the children brushes and a mirror, and let them go to town!
Artificial colors are more likely to leave a light stain on the skin, but it shouldn’t be more than a little soap and warm water can handle.
Recipe from Recipes for Play: Creative Activities for Small Hands and Big Imaginations, copyright © Rachel Sumner and Ruth Mitchener, 2014. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Experiment. Available wherever books are sold.
