Shaving Cream + Paint = Art

I came across 'Shaving Cream Art' a couple weeks ago and thought the boys might have fun with it.  They did:)  Damek moreso than Kyan as Damek was able to do every step on his own and have more control whereas Kyan needed my help with squirting the shaving cream and scraping.

You'll need shaving cream in a can, liquid watercolors (ours came from Discount School Supply), and painting paper.  We used a whole pad of painting paper and resorted to using drawing paper at the end and although it worked, with it being thinner it was harder to pull off the shaving cream as well as it curled a lot while drying.  We went through 2 cans of shaving cream and would have probably went through a third if we would have had it as Damek was on a roll last night:)  We did the project earlier in the day and later after dinner Damek decided that he wanted to do some more and Kyan followed suit.

To start just squirt some shaving cream into an area approximately the size of your paper.

Then drip some paint in various places on top of your shaving cream

until it looks something like this

and stir.  We used the back end of a paintbrush.  Don't stir too much, just enough to make some cool swirls.  My first one I stirred too much and it mixed all the colors together into one color.

After mixing it will look something like this

Put your paper on top of the mixture and press lightly over the whole paper to push the surface into the mixture.  Peel  your paper off the shaving cream/paint and scrape the mixture off.  We used a paint scrapper, but your could also use a credit card.

 Once you start scraping it reveals the cool designs underneath.

After scraping all the shaving cream/paint off the paper, let it dry.  They dry fairly quickly.

If you want you can "refresh" (or recycle) your shaving cream mixture with more paint on top of the old and mix again, which is what I did, and got very good & different results from the first, but Damek preferred to start fresh with each one.

There's lots of different possibilities for continuing to create with the finished pieces.  On the blog I got the idea from, the kids drew over the designs to make pictures.  The boys wanted to use one of theirs as a birthday card for Lee (his birthday is tomorrow) and I had the idea of cutting  them into heart shapes to use as valentines.

Finished pieces

Here's a couple from each of us 

Damek's

 Mine

 Kyan's

 Lee's