Hellobee

Do your kids like getting their hands a little messy? Give them a chance to paint a masterpiece or just enjoy a sticky, squishy rainbow with this easy to make sensory paint. It’s a bit like finger paint, but thicker and more mushy. It’s also taste-safe because it’s made with pudding!

You can make this paint with pre-made pudding cups (the easiest!) or make your own pudding. Either way, it’s fast and easy to mix up a batch and get your kids creating in a hurry.

Try a few colors, or make a whole rainbow!

You will need:

Pudding
Food Coloring
Craft Sticks
Cardstock or a Large Tray

For each color, drip the food coloring into the pudding cups.

And stir them with a craft stick. At first it will feel like the pudding is breaking apart, but once you give it a good stir it smooths out. It takes a fair amount of mixing to get the color even, so try to get all the way to the bottom and around the edges.

Using regular snack cups of pudding, follow this food coloring guide to achieve the colors shown here, or adjust to your liking.

Red: 12 red drops

Orange: 8 yellow drops + 2 red drops

Yellow: 6 yellow drops

Green: 8 green drops

Blue: 5 blue drops

Purple: 5 red drops + 1 blue drop

After the colors are mixed, I recommend transferring the “paint” into other containers. Because it’s made of pudding, it’s totally safe for most kids to eat, but that doesn’t mean you want them eating six cups of pudding!

Change out the containers before they see that it’s pudding and you’ll help prevent overeating on the paint.

Arrange the paint in color order (it looks so appealing that way!) and put out a piece of cardstock. Paper will work, but cardstock holds up better.

Instead of cardstock, you can give your child a large tray to paint on. Of course, they won’t be able to keep the art they make, but that’s okay. This is more about the sensory experience.

If you leave the craft sticks in the paint, your child can use them to spread the paint onto their paper.

What I found most interesting as I invited my little sister to explore this paint was that she resisted. She was hoping that she could paint only with the craft sticks or that I would give her a brush.

When he was younger, one of my brothers would have also been sensory defensive about painting with his fingers. Which is a good reason to pull out things like this for little ones who aren’t so sure about touching something squishy.

Eventually I got my sister to get her hands dirty!

She pressed her hands into the paint and even did some writing and drawing in the rainbow she had smoothed onto the page.

One important note about messy pudding paint hands: Because they are colored with food coloring, the paint will leave a small amount of color on skin. But it comes off within a couple hand washings. On a similar note, it’s a good idea to have kids wear smocks when painting.

If you used cardstock, let the painting dry overnight. The colors will deepen and the “paint” will firm up and have a great texture.

Leftover sensory paint can be refrigerated for a few days for future painting. Just make sure the rest of the family knows not to eat it!

Happy painting!