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Lately I have been leaning more to some art exploration for the kids. We have done some salt painting as well as crayon resist art where we hunted for some dinosaurs! Today I share our little oil painting for kids exploration.
How to Set up an Oil Painting for Kids Exploration
Not only was this a great mixing experiment but it also provided me the opportunity to talk about density of the water and oil.
My 5 year old got to use an eye dropper again which seems to be a favorite thing lately!
Materials we used
Cooking oil
Plastic cups
Gel food coloring (or candy food coloring)
Eye dropper
Water
Tray (or cookie sheet)
Cardstock
Oil painting directions
To do oil painting, mix up some food coloring with cooking oil in a few cups. I have used gel coloring as well as candy coloring. Liquid water colors do not mix well.
Use a tray and add a thin layer of water to cover the bottom. Next use your eye dropper to drop the colorful oil in various patterns on top of the water.
I suggest using a thicker than normal paper, like card stock, when oil painting with kids. Place the paper gently on top of the surface of your creation.
The oils will now be absorbed into the paper along with the colors.
Remove the paper and let it settle on a surface to dry out.
Encourage the children to experiment with using smaller or larger drops as they paint. Use as big or as small drops for creating your master art pieces!
These we will be hanging in our new schooling area once I get the art display board up!
Have you tried oil painting with children before? I’d love to hear how your painting experiences went.
Pin this quick idea for later!
Rebecca says
I tried mixing the gel food coloring but it just broke up into small pieces and didn’t color the oil, am I missing something?
Nicolette Roux says
it should have colored the oil for sure. strange. what type of oil were you using? do you have access to other food coloring? perhaps the oil based one? (used for candy coloring)
Trina says
I must be missing something, how did you get the oil to mix with the food coloring?
Nicolette Roux says
i used gel colors the ones like liquid coloring or water colors will not mix will the oil. I’ll update the post to include this. thanks.
Trina says
Thanks!
Devany says
Beautiful! I love this technique!
Laura @ Lalymom says
Wow! That looks awesome and my kids would love using the droppers! How cool!
Emma says
How pretty this comes out! Very cool that there’s some science mixed in too.
Samantha @ Stir the Wonder says
This looks so cool!