Painting with Marbles

 

You’ll need:

• Marbles.
• Paint.
• Heavy paper.
• Shallow box, box lid or similar.

 

We used a large box lid and simply placed a piece of heavy paper inside. We didn’t need to tape it down but depending on the weight of your paper, you may prefer to use some tape to hold it in place.

I put blue, yellow and red paint on a small plate and showed E how to dip her marbles in the paint and roll them across the paper.

 

She tried using a marble as a sort of paintbrush at one time

 

but mostly, she stuck to rolling {and tossing} the marbles on the paper.

 

After a while, I showed her how to tilt the box lid to roll all the marbles at once. She really enjoyed that and managed to keep all the marbles contained almost all of the time.

 

After some tilting in all four directions, our piece of art looked pretty nice

 

but we weren’t even close to having used all the marbles or all the paint.

I suggested we put all the marbles straight in the paint, and E placed them carefully on the plate, then dumped them on the paper.

 

Some more tilting

 

and our marble painting was complete!

 

The clean-up was quite fun as well: We simply dumped the marbles and the plate in the sink.

 

E had fun playing with the water and doing some pouring

 

and ended up getting everything cleaned up almost without noticing it.

 

What I learned:

It really wasn’t as messy as I’d thought.

Sure, our hands ended up quite colorful but it washed off easily, and we only had the odd marble on the floor here and there that was easily picked up. E did an awesome job keeping the marbles contained in the box lid.

 

Additional suggestions:

• Use water beads instead of or in addition to marbles.
• Use nuts.
• For smaller scale art, use a food storage container.
• Put a lid on your container and shake it.

 

Have you tried painting with marbles? Tell me about it in the comments!

 

 

 

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