Lots of children in my home means I need a lot of art/boredom busting supplies on hand. I go to the city once a week, that means I don’t usually have everything on hand that they want to do. In the case of paint, I just didn’t want the big clean up of tempera paint, but didn’t think to buy watercolors.

Homemade Watercolors

It turns out, making watercolor paint is super easy, and despite what I though originally I couldn’t screw it up by not paying attention to what I was doing. I looked at a lot of different recipes online before making this. They are all basically the same, give or take a tablespoon of this or that. This is my version of them, it works for us.

8 tbsp baking soda
4 tbsp cornstarch
1 tsp light corn syrup
4 tbsp white vinegar
Food Coloring

Mix well. Make sure to have a good size bowl or measuring cup for mixing or stand over a sink. I put the color in the individual containers then added the mixture so we had a number of colors to choose from.

Let them sit over night. Then have fun. Bowl of water and some paint brushes and the kids had fun for quite awhile.

They were a big enough hit that I made up some more today for this week. Very little clean up involved, everything, including the paint brushes went into the dishwasher.

Have you made your own paint before, if so how did it turn out?