Pour Painting with Funnels

We love trying different ways to paint. A few of our favorite techniques for painting without brushes include good old finger painting, ice painting with frozen watercolors, making prints with cookie cutters, and splat painting with fly swatters. At the beginning of summer I bought a couple sets of funnels from Dollar Tree to use for water play. Peanut and Tank, my two year old twins, love to paint and to pour, so I knew they would be thrilled to combine their two favorite activities with some funnel painting.

I set up the invitation to paint with funnels by mixing up five colors of our simple soap paint recipe, setting out a few funnels and small containers to scoop the paint into the funnels. I covered the table with a shower curtain from Dollar Tree and then spread out a large piece of butcher paper.

How to Paint with Funnels

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Supplies:

flour
dish soap
Kool Aid
water
funnels
containers
butcher paper

Any paint will do, but because this activity uses quite a bit of paint I wanted to use an inexpensive and easy recipe. Our soap paint recipe couldn't be more simple! This time I used Kool Aid to color the paint instead of food coloring like in the original recipe. Typically adding Kool Aid to paint produces vibrant colors and delicious scents. Because of the dish soap in the recipe the scents were slightly overpowered. For this reason I will most likely stick to food coloring or liquid watercolors with this recipe in the future.

To make the paint mix 2 cups of flour, 1/2 cup* of soap, and 1 cup of water with 1 packed of Kool Aid powder or a several drops of coloring. Mix well with a whisk to get out the lumps.

*This is less than the original recipe. I wanted this paint to be thicker and not too watery.

It was so cool watching the colors drip through the funnels and mix!

All four of my boys really got into this painting activity. JZ (6) and J-Bug (4) could maneuver the funnels and bowls easily. Tank and Peanut (24 months) needed my help holding either the funnel or the small container.

As I mentioned this activity used a lot of paint. JZ discovered that he could scoop up the paint and pour it right back into a funnel to extend the art project.

He was really in his element with this art activity. Lately he hasn't been too interested in painting, but he scooped and scooped until he filled one of the containers to start pouring through the funnels again. When the container was empty he began scooping all over again.