Slinky Painting

Did you play with slinkys when you were a kid? Me too! I loved them, but I never used them this way! We have so much fun with action art, so we decided to test out slinky painting recently.

Trust me when I say, you HAVE to try it.

My girls absolutely had a ball painting this way. In the past we’ve shared tons of ideas for painting without paintbrushes, but I think this is going to quickly rise to the top of their favorites list.

Slinky Painting

Materials

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• Large paper (we used paper from a large paper roll)
• Slinkys (ours were from Dollar Tree)
• Tempera paint 

Added bonus? This activity is very easy to set up! Simply roll out your paper. Sqeeze some paint around the paper.

Set a bin of water nearby for quick clean up when you’re done.

Then start exploring with the slinkys.

See it in Action

 

Step-by-Step Tutorial

Ways to Paint with a Slinky

Since this is process art I didn’t give any directions before letting the girls get started. However, as they explored they tested out a variety of ways to paint with the slinkys.

First the tried stamping with the end of the slinky without letting it bounc much.

Then they started bouncing it more and more to see what would happen.

After a while they were dropping the slinky from as high as they could reach.

Then they experimented with holding the middle of the slinky and letting two ends bounce on the surface at the same time.

They also spent some time dragging the slinkys across the surface.

At one point they held both ends of the slinky and bounced the middle part up and down to see what would happen then.

Their creations were beautiful!

Even the slinkys were beautifully painted, but if you don’t want painted slinkys just toss them in the water bucket during clean up time and they’ll get clean after a little soaking.

I hope you have as much fun with this activity as we did!

Paint-a-Thon

We did this activity as part of the massive Paint-a-Thon going on this month. Some seriously creative bloggers are sharing some fun painting activities that you can try too. Head over to the Paint-a-Thon main page to see what other fun activities are waiting.