Painting with Shaving Cream

We’ve been doing lots of Christmas crafts in the past couple of weeks and we’ve done two different ones that involve shaving cream.

We started out with a technique that is supposed to give a marbling effect.  I cut out various shapes from cardstock – stockings, trees, ornaments and stars.  I put a small amount of foam shaving cream in a bowl and (my first mistake) let the kids take turn picking colors.  It would have been easier, and much less messy, if I either made them agree on one set of colors to use for all the shapes or given them each their own bowl of shaving cream to chose one set of colors for all their own shapes.  Instead I “cleaned” the shaving cream between each set of shapes so they could all be different colors.

We added of few drops of paint in two or three colors to the shaving cream and the kids lightly swirled it around using children’s butter knives.

We then placed the cardstock shapes on the shaving cream/paint and lightly pressed down.   The cardstock was removed and the excess shaving cream removed using a ruler.

Vicki decided right away she preferred using the knife to just transfer plops of paint and shaving cream onto her cardstock shapes.  At which point, I did end up getting a second bowl of cream for Georgie to use.

I evidently didn’t scrape off enough of the shaving cream (the paint appeared to be coming off as well when I scraped too close to the cardstock) and we ended up with a slightly puffy look to our shapes.  Which was great except that any touch either flattened it right out or caused it to flake off.

 

The kids enjoyed this enough that they kept asking to do more.  I found it messy and the results somewhat disappointing.   I think marble painting (where a cardstock shape is put into a container, paint covered marbles are added and rolled over the cardstock) produces a nicer effect and is a LOT less messy.

Our second project was using a mixture of shaving cream and Elmer’s glue to make puffy paints.   I drew the outline of a snowman on dark colored cardstock with chalk and allowed the kids to paint it using this mixture.

The kids then used pompoms, paper circles and googly eyes to decorate their snowmen.  Georgie also did some embellishment using chalk.

 

I don’t know if I messed up the “recipe” even though it wasn’t very complicated (equal parts shaving cream and glue) but our snowmen weren’t as puffy as our other shaving cream paintings.

I’ll be posting about all our other Christmas crafts in the next week.