Ditch Chalk for This Easy 4-Ingredient Puffy Sidewalk Paint!
Make this fun and easy puffy sidewalk paint!
Need a low-cost, low-maintenance kids’ summer activity? Try making this 4-ingredient DIY puffy sidewalk paint! It’s a perfect activity to get the family outdoors and spend some time being creative with your little artists.
Painting with squirt bottles is FUN!
All it takes is an easy-to-make mixture of water, flour, shaving cream, and food coloring. Consider grabbing a few squirt bottles just like traditional puffy paint, or you could also check out the Dollar Tree for other bottles/ containers.
If you’d prefer, you can place paint in small bowls and use paintbrushes, or even a large muffin tin with different onlinepartments would work nicely.
Hip tips for making this 4-ingredient DIY puffy sidewalk paint:
- While we didn’t have any issues with staining, the food coloring in the paint could potentially stain your sidewalk or driveway. To avoid this, try using soap coloring to tint your paint. It’s safe for skin, it rinses off hard surfaces with water, and it won’t stain your child’s clothing either!
- The squirt bottles really make sidewalk painting fun, but they’re not required! You could just cut the corner off a Ziploc bag and use it to “pipe” decorations onto your sidewalk like cake frosting.
- This puffy “chalk” paint works best when fresh, so try to prepare it at the last minute and don’t make more than you plan to use in a day. If you let it sit around for a day or two, it will develop an unpleasant smell. Gas will also build up inside the bottle, potentially causing the lid to pop off and create a mess!
DIY Puffy Sidewalk Paint
PrintSupplies Needed
- gallon freezer bags
- 1 cup flour
- 1 cup water
- food coloring (or soap coloring)
- 1/2 cup shaving cream
- plastic squirt bottles
Directions
1
Inside a gallon-sized freezer bag, mix flour and water together so there are no clumps.
2
Add 10 drops of food coloring and roughly 1/2 cup of shaving cream. Close the baggie and mix well using your hands on the outside of the bag.
3
Cut the end of the bag and pipe the mixture into the bottle. Don’t cut the end too large or it will be difficult to get it into the bottle.
4
Secure lid and squeeze onto the sidewalk to draw. Keep some toothpicks nearby in case the squirt bottles get plugged with a clump of flour. That happened to us, but it was easy to fix.
Here’s what my Hip Sidekick, Chelsey, had to say about this fun DIY with her kiddos…
Hooray for fun DIY paint! When I saw Lina’s washable puffy “chalk” paint recipe was so simple, I knew I had to try it ASAP! My kiddos could have definitely painted for hours, and now that we’re ‘experts’ on the recipe, I’m sure this will be a repeat summer activity.
The squirt bottles are definitely half the fun, and the ones we chose were flexible enough that my older two could squeeze them easily, but for younger kiddos, you might opt for a paintbrush or dropper. My youngest squeezed a little hard, hence some of the ‘puffier’ drawings 😉 but I didn’t mind because all of it washed right off! Can’t reonlinemend this fun activity enough!
Try these other fun summer activities for kids (many are FREE)!
