Painting with water beads

Painting with water beads is a really interesting way to paint and it was the first time doing it last week for my boy. We had done this before with my girl, way before the little boy was born, so it was still a novel activity for her.

We initially placed some coffee filter paper in a small box together with water beads and I put some paint (their choice of colours) on them and instructed the kids to tilt the box such that the water beads moved around and did the painting. These turned out pretty in the beginning until the filters were entirely soaked up as they were really absorbent so we swapped the filters for normal drawing block.

Note that if you intend to preserve these pretty pieces of art, do stop all the tilting when the colours are really beautifully blended with streaks of paint and marbling to prevent over-mixing of colours. It’d become a brownish mess if you don’t stop. By all means, if it’s just for enjoying the process, then go ahead! 😀

Here are some shots taken during the process as well as the pieces of work I saved at the end.

My boy kept trying to squish the water beads and try to move them about with his hand when he started

made with a mixture of cobalt blue, silver and gold

couldn’t resist taking a shot of the beautifully blended colours in between changing papers

I didn’t drain the water beads properly after rinsing the colours off for the next piece so the colour quickly smudged for this piece

I added a touch of red later and it still turned out great

After adding a little more paint and more controlled tilting, here’s the outcome for the blue, silver and gold piece

Here’s one she did with vermillion, white, yellow and light green

And a burst of multiple colours for this piece!

It’s pretty simple to set up – just get a box (we used one of the small Ikea ones), gather some water beads and poster paint. Clean-up was merely rinsing the boxes and the water beads – you needn’t trash the water beads (after cleaning them, they can be saved for future play). You’d probably need to supervise this activity as the kids could get overly excited and water beads might end up all over the floor – spells bad news of course since they are coated with paint. 🙂 Have fun!

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