Marbled shaving cream art for kids is a very easy process art activity. What we love about it is how unique every creation is. Even with the same colors and shaving cream each piece of art turns out very different. It’s also a great way to create art with young kids.
Since we’ve been learning about a fish theme, we turned the creations we made into fish, but you can leave them as is or turn them into anything you’d like.
Get a full week of fish theme lesson plans for
Home Preschool or your Preschool Classroom.
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To get started we sprayed shaving cream into a pan large enough to fit our paper. Then the kids added drops of food coloring. A little goes a long way so you don’t need to add a lot. Also note that food coloring is not washable. Wear play clothes and plan for the possibility of tinted hands for a bit. If you prefer a washable version, you can also use liquid watercolors.
Next we used a toothpick to swirl the food coloring around a bit. You don’t need to stir it to much, just let kids blend a little.
Then place your paper onto the mixture and pat it so that all the paper gets shaving cream on it. The squishing of the shaving cream is especially fun for toddlers!
Next you’ll want to pick up the paper. Use your fingers or grab with tongs or clothespins if you are trying to be a bit less messy. Lay it onto a flat surface. We use a cookie sheet.
Then it’s time to remove the excess shaving cream. We use a squeegee for this step.
The kids love to see their designs revealed as they slowly move the squeegee across the paper. You can repeat these steps multiple times with the same batch of shaving cream. As you do you may need to add extra shaving cream or food coloring, and your pictures will looks different each time as the colors blend more and more.
You can choose whether to display your creations as they are or turn them into something of interest to your child. Like I said before, we’ve been reading about fish, so we created some tropical fish to make a large ocean scene as we get closer to summer vacation.
The Amazon widget below includes some of the books we’ve been reading.
Visit our ocean theme Pinterest Board for more fish activities and ideas for learning about ocean animals.
Follow Shaunna @ Fantastic Fun and Learning’s board Ocean Theme on Pinterest.
Get a Full Week of Fish Theme Learning and Play
Save time and get right to the playful learning with our printable lesson plan sets. Each set includes over 30 playful learning activities related to the theme, and we’ve provided different versions for home preschool families and classroom teachers so all activities are geared directly toward your needs.
This set includes active hands-on learning ideas and the following printables:
1) 1-15 Fish and Fish Bowl Counting Mats
2) Uppercase Letter Fish Cards
3) Lowercase Letter Bubble Cards
4) 0-31 Fish Number Cards
5) Fish Patterning and Sorting Cards
6) Fish Roll and Graph Math Game
7) Word Segmenting Fish
8) Shape Fish
9) Fish Word Building Mats
10) Fish Size Ordering and Sorting Cards
Tara
Do you think this would work with whipped cream? At my preschool my littles aren’t allowed to use shaving cream but I want to try this so badly with them!
Shaunna
Great question, Tara! Unfortunately, I am not sure if it would create the same effect if you used whipped cream. It has a similar texture to the shaving cream, but the ingredients/food properties may make it behave differently. But please give it a try and let me know how it goes! The end product is so cool that I think it’s worth a go with your little ones!
Shaunna
Joanna
I love this! Oh – and my kids would too! For all the mess, it turned out so pretty!
Shaunna Evans
Don’t they look gorgeous? And the kids had so much fun. I hope yours do, too.
Tiffiny
This looks super cool! I’m not artistic at all, so I love getting inspiration from others. Thanks for sharing! I’ve already pinned.