Homemade Paint Recipe for Thanksgiving

Fall Art Recipe - Thanksgiving Sensory Paint

I love Thanksgiving.  The best part is how the whole house smells amazing while dinner is cooking.  Sometimes I think the anticipation of the meal is even better than the meal itself.  Well okay, probably not better.  My boys always love the homemade paint recipes I make for them, so I thought they would enjoy some Thanksgiving sensory paints, a simple art recipe for fall.  I did my best to capture the wonderful scents of Thanksgiving dinner, although I didn't attempt to recreate a turkey scent.  That would have been weird.  ;).

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Supplies:

• flour
• water
• cooking oil
• food coloring or liquid watercolors
• dried cranberries or cranberry sauce
• sage
• pumpkin pie spice
• whole cloves
• lemons or lemon juice

How to Make Thanksgiving Sensory Paint

Directions:  This simple base recipe is comprised of water, oil, and flour.  For each scent/color I used 1/4 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of water and 3 tablespoons of oil.  You can mix in a bowl, in a sealed ziploc baggie, or in a blender.  Because I added food and spices to the base recipe, I used my Vitamix to blend each batch.

1.  Sage Green - Sage is my favorite spice for stuffing, so I used dried sage to scent the green paint.  I added green liquid watercolor paint and approximately one tablespoon of sage.

2.  Pumpkin Pie Orange - When I walk buy the pumpkin pies at Costco my mind immediately dreams of Thanksgiving.  To make the pumpkin pie paint I added pumpkin pie spice and orange liquid watercolor paint to the base recipe.

3.  Clove Brown - My husband is the Thanksgiving chef in our house, and his favorite way to cook a turkey is with whole cloves and oranges.  I used whole cloves and brown liquid watercolor paint with the third batch.

4.  Lemon Yellow - In addition to pumpkin pie, our family has either lemon meringue or double lemon cream pie every year.  I used a whole lemon and some yellow food coloring for this scent.  Lemon juice would work well in place of the whole lemon.

5.  Cranberry Red - The final paint color was made with dried cranberries and red food coloring.  Canned cranberry would have been better, since the dried cranberries don't really have a strong scent.  The color was gorgeous, so this final flavor made the perfect addition to our Thanksgiving paint set.

Please note - With flour as the base, this paint recipe requires more coloring than other homemade paint recipes.  I went through quite a bit of food coloring.  I prefer liquid watercolors, but I am out of yellow and red.

J-Bug (4) was the first of my boys to show interest in painting.  I had the pumpkin pie spice and sage out on the table for the photo, and he eagerly asked to add more spice to the paints.

The colors were quite lovely, and this paint recipe works just like tempura and other store bought paints.  It dried much darker than it appeared when wet.

One of the many wonderful things about this homemade paint recipe is that it can be stored in an airtight container and used again another day!  If it thickens up just add a bit of water and mix with a spoon or paintbrush before using.

For more homemade paint recipes follow me on Pinterest.

More art recipes for fall:

Candy Apple Puffy Paint ~ Fall Finger Paint ~ Candy Corn Quick Paint

    

Our complete collection of homemade paint recipes.