Painting With Young Kids

Painting with young kids is fun but it can be a hassle. There’s spilled paint, painted siblings, painted hair, paint in the nose and maybe even paint in the ears.  Painting with young kids can give you gray hair way before your time.  But with a few simple tips, painting with young kids can be easier.  1.  Mix a few drops of dish soap into paint when painting with kids. The soap helps it easily clean up, especially when the paint gets dripped or spilled on clothing.  2. Buy powdered Tempra paint. Yes, it can be messy to mix and the powder can go everywhere if you spill it. But you’re going to get the most bang for your buck this way as 1 lb. of powdered tempera paint is only a few dollars and will last you a very long time. It can easily be mixed with soap to make it easier to clean up. Dry tempra paint can be used for so many things. You can easily change the consistency of the paint, use the dry powder in crafts, or make custom colors.  3.  Use a large piece of oilcloth to protect your table or other surfaces.  Oilcloth is cheap and folds up easily for storage. Most importantly, it easily wipes clean and is heavy enough to help hold it down to the surface without being flimsy.  4. Use low flat sandwich sized tupperware bowls to hold paint. Yes the colored paint pots are cute but are easy to knock over. It is hard to knock over the low containers and at the end of the day, you can just pop the top onto the tupperware to store extra paint.  5. Painting with paint brushes are fun but sometimes it’s more fun to mix it up a bit. Give them chopsticks, straws, Q-tips, stamps or cut up potatoes to paint with.  6. Help teach them color basics by giving them two primary colors at a time.  Don’t do this every time but every now and then it’s a great way to teach them how to mix colors.  Give them two colors such as blue and yellow and them watch green magically appear.  After they learn the basics you can teach them hues by adding white to the colors and shades by adding a small touch of black.   7. Leave the perfection out of it. This tip is more for the grownups than the children. It’s a painting by a child, not a Picasso. If they want the sky to be purple and the grass to be orange, why try to change that?  Painting with children wasn’t meant to be perfect. It’s a time to explore. Be messy, have fun and just paint.  Check out Heart Prints or Easy Potato Prints for other great painting activities with young kids.  If you want to save this post for later or share it with your friends, you can find it on Pinterest here.      *post contains affiliate links