Chalk Paint

 

We’ve made and enjoyed homemade sidewalk chalk before. We’ve even tried gold and silver sidewalk chalk. While E always had fun with it, it’s undeniable that it takes a lot of liquid watercolors or food coloring to make vibrant colors with the popular cornstarch-based recipe, and it can be hard to use it with a regular paintbrush.

We had a medium-sized collection of broken up store-bought chalk, so we decided to try a different recipe from Learn Play Imagine to make a very vibrant homemade Chalk Paint that can be applied smoothly with a paintbrush.

 

(E was 4 years and 3 months old.)

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Materials for vibrant homemade chalk paint:

• Chalk sticks – broken up preferred.
• Water.
• Ziploc baggies.
• Hammer or mallet (optional).

 

 

 

We gathered our materials, and E sorted the bits of chalk by color into the Ziploc baggies.

 

 

We chose to put white and yellow together since we didn’t have much of either color.

 

 

We decided to go without a hammer or mallet, and crushed the chalk with our feet. E stomped and even jumped on the bags, but turning the chalk into a powder was a lot harder than I’d expected. {Admittedly, we had jumbo chalk sticks…}

 

 

 

E’s efforts hardly made a dent, and even my legs got really tired pretty fast. We didn’t get everything crushed into a powder but decided to give it a go anyway with some larger pieces still in the bags.

 

 

E gently poured the crushed chalk into applesauce cups. At first, I thought they were too small, but we were able to make plenty of chalk paint and still had lots of crushed chalk left over for another project.

 

 

 

E added a small amount of water to each applesauce cup

 

 

 

and stirred with a chopstick.

 

 

I removed some of the bigger pieces but it didn’t really make a difference. The sort of pale powder chalk turned into nice vibrant chalk paint pretty much immediately. The blue and red turned out especially nice, while there was just a tiny bit too much water in the yellow and green.

 

 

The first stroke with a paintbrush proved that we’d reached our goal – it looked great!

 

 

I got into the chalk paint fun, too, and painted a vibrant red heart. E decided to fill it in – and discovered once again that painting with blue over wet red paint makes purple 🙂

 

 

E really enjoyed all the vibrant colors!

 

 

Sure, the yellow wasn’t all that {not yet, anyway – keep reading!} but it was just fun to paint the backyard with a paintbrush!

 

 

Even Baby N wanted to get in on it 😉

 

 

As the paint was drying {and the sun was going down 😉 }, it changed to very intense pastel hues. Once the paint had dried completely, even the yellow and green became a lot more intense.

 

 

 

 

Have you tried making chalk paint or sidewalk chalk? Which recipe did you use? What were your results? Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you!

 

 

This post is part of the painting challenge blog hop hosted by Messy Little Monster.

Follow along and try all the different techniques yourself!

 

 

 

 

 

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