Today is the third and final day in our Spring Play Days series with my friends at Buggy and Buddy, Fun-A-Day!, Twodaloo, and Fantastic Fun and Learning!
In case you missed them, our first two posts were:
Homemade Puffy Paint with Flower Sun Catchers
I thought I’d end my part of the series with a post involving fresh flowers. Last year, we experimented with flower petal paint in our preschool co-op. And, honestly, it didn’t turn out so well. The sensory experience was great, but the colors were just okay. But I decided I’d give flower paint another try using red rose petals from a bouquet from Nate.
I started by soaking the red rose petals in a jar.
This left us with a brownish-orange water/paint.
So then I pureed the rose petals in the food processor to see if this changed the color.
And it did! We ended up with deep, dark purple.
I added a little flour to one jar to thicken it up, but my girls were just as happy with the tinted water. If you use just tinted water, you need heavy paper when you paint; otherwise it will tear!
On paper, the color is very, very light. This was fine for my one-year-old, but my three-year-old asked for something brighter. So we added a few drops of food coloring.
It hurt me a bit that we’re so used to the sensational brightness of artificial dyes that natural color disappoints us.
I know I’ve seen other bloggers who have had more success creating bright flower paints. A quick search reminded me of this Homemade Watercolors from Fresh Flowers post from Learn Play Imagine. Allison’s colors were much brighter than mine!
Nate tells me that if I boiled off some of the water, I’d probably end up with a richer, darker color. Good to know for next time.
After my oldest daughter painted for a bit, she used the wine corks I set out as stamps. She stamped a bit, but then decided she preferred dunking the entire cork and rolling it across her page.
The true success of the rose petal paint is that it did, in fact, smell like roses!
This paint passed the sniff test.
And the bits of pureed petals that ended up in the water gave the paint an interesting texture.
Perhaps the biggest measure of the paint’s success is that I left the jars out for a few days, and my daughter kept coming back to paint more.
For more homemade paint recipes, check out these 11 Super Simple Paint Recipes. They all use three ingredients or less!
Don’t leave without clicking over to see the great ideas shared by my blogging friends! I love their creativity.
Fun-A-Day!
Buggy and Buddy
Twodaloo
2 thoughts on “How to Make Rose Petal Paint”