Homemade fingerpaint recipe and making repurposed hearts

I recently checked out this super cool book from the library called Recipes for Art and Craft Materials, by Helen Roney Sattler. It is jam packed with instructions on how to make an array of fun crafty concoctions to use with your children or students, such as pastes, modeling compounds, paper-mache, and paints, etc. Making these common craft materials at home from scratch cost way less than buying the finished items from the store...I like that!
On this day, I thought that it would be fun to try my hand in making fingerpaint using a recipe from the book as a reference.

Ingredients needed:

• 1/2 cup cornstarch
• 1 cup cold water
• 1 envelope unflavored gelatin
• 2 cups boiling water
• small air-tight jars
• poster paints

Step one: Mix cornstarch with 3/4 cup cold water in a saucepan.
Step two: Soak gelatin in 1/4 cup cold water. Let sit.
Step three: Pour boiling water into cornstarch mixture pouring slowly and stirring constantly.
Step four: Cook cornstarch mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly, letting mixture boil until it becomes pretty clear in color.
Step five: Remove from stove; stir in gelatin.
Step six: Let cool and then pour equal amounts into jars. Add paint and mix well.

Store in refrigerator. The paints will last for a few days. Be sure not to let them sit out for too long as the paints will thicken up and lose their "slippery" quality.

Stirring up gelatin and water mixture

Cornstarch on stove: boiling and clearing...

Fingerpainting? Bode decides it is more fun for Gumby to be ice skating on the rainbow pond than to actually fingerpaint. LOL. Soon Pokey the horse was to join in also...

The finished paintings after they dried

This proved to be such a successful, fun project, for my son, who enjoyed helping with making the fingerpaint as well as the actual fingerpainting itself! The paint took a long time to dry — a good 24 hours — but once it did, it was glossy, hard, able to bend (it only cracked a teeny bit).

 

In honor of Valentine's Day, I turned the paintings into repurposed puffy hearts.  I think this was such a sweet idea from Scrumdillydo. You can find the directions here. 

Happy Valentine's Day to you all! 

Thanks for visiting!