Crafts for Kids: DIY Sidewalk Paint
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Getting most kids outside should not be hard. But if your child is anything like mine, the thought of putting on one’s shoes and physically opening the front door seems too much to bear, and when you combine that general lack of enthusiasm with my own innate dislike of Mother Nature, it usually means that you’re in for a lot of time indoors. Or at least it did – until we discovered… DIY sidewalk paint.
This is not to be confused with sidewalk chalk. No, this is DIY sidewalk PAINT that you can make with just three ingredients, none of which are chalk, despite the fact that the end-result resembles it quite a bit. We like it more because you can make the colors exactly the shade you want, it’s less messy, and if you run out, you can just make more!
INGREDIENTS
- 1/4 cup cornstarch*
- 1/4 cup water*
- Food coloring
INSTRUCTIONS
Put cornstarch into a large bowl; add water and mix until clumps are gone. It will start off super thick and hard to stir, but as you keep doing it, it will completely dissolve.
Add 3 drops of food coloring until you get your desired shade. Mix to keep the cornstarch from sinking to the bottom.
Use a paintbrush (we use these sponge ones) and have at it! You’ll want to stir every so often while painting to keep the mixture from sticking.
FINAL NOTES
Your colors will become more vibrant as the paint dries, and you can use them wherever you’d typically use sidewalk chalk. For example, look at these three photos below. The first one was taken as soon as I finished, while the second and third were about 10 minutes later. Pretty wild how different the shades are, no?
I’d also recommend doing this in a place where you don’t mind the designs lasting for a while, as they don’t go away incredibly quickly. We had a small drizzle the other day and I was expecting everything to be gone, but there are still some remnants hanging around on our driveway. You can also use a hose or pot of water to have it disappear faster. And my guess is that sticking to only 3 drops of food coloring as opposed to dumping the whole bottle into your bowl like we did would likely elicit better results too…
Store your DIY sidewalk paint in an airtight lid for a few days too if you don’t use everything up – just shake before use. Or be like us and throw the leftover paint onto the driveway in one big launch like this guy. Definitely worth trying at least once in your life because it felt kind of liberating… haha!