Homemade Puffy Paint with Sparkle Sand

Make gritty puffy paint with a wonderful sandy texture for your next kids art project. Perfect art activity for the summer!

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We are at it again with a nice summery art activity with a sandy texture. After playing with scented edible “sand” and scented edible “sand dough” we continued with the sand theme, except this time we used the real stuff. The resulting homemade puffy paint turned out super fantastic. We have tried the basic puffy paint recipe many times over with great success. Our favorite was the fall tree puffy paint art and our Halloween puffy paint art project. We have also loved the simpler shaving cream puffy paint.

This time however we added lots of sparkles.

The gritty sparkle sand paint was absolutely gorgeous.

Fairly easy to make a batch too.

You will see below that this step was totally unnecessary. Although my child loved digging through the paint and helped it push through the funnel faster. Faster into the squeeze bottles.

Can you “see” the wonderful texture of this sparkle sandy paint? If you happen to do this art project during a sunny afternoon, you will be in for a treat. The sand and the glitter will shine like diamonds.

Since the puffy paint had a lot more texture, it wouldn’t flow the bottles. So I would not put these homemade puffy paint into bottles.

Instead just spread the paint using a spoon on cardboard and use a cotton bud to spread it further.

The microwaved puffy paint art just looks stunning! Sparkly, sandy and puffy! Doesn’t it like look like our 1 minute salt painting?

The puffed art is amazing to touch. It’s squishy, gritty and warm to touch. It’s always great to make your own homemade paints and art recipes.

Now for the homemade puffy paint recipe with sparkle sand

Ingredients

1/2 cup white flour
2 tsp baking soda
little less than 1/2 cup Play Sand
Liquid Watercolors
or Food color

Method

Add 1/2 cup of white flour to a large bowl. Mix in enough water to make a thick batter while removing all the lumps using a whisk. Add enough liquid watercolors or food coloring to get a vibrant color. Now add little less than 1/2 cup of sand and start mixing again. The batter now gets much grittier. To make the puffy paint shinier, add a big dose of fine glitter.

With a big batch of sparkle sandy puffy paint, invite your child to paint, smear, smudge, pour, spread on a sheet of cardboard. Once the art is deemed done, place the cardboard in the microwave for 30 seconds to 45 seconds based on the thickness.

Display the art for a couple of days. I usually save the pieces until the flour in the art starts turning moldy or starts flaking off.

Thanks for reading

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