Shaving Cream and Liquid Watercolors Experiments

 

 

If you’ve read my recent post about how we made Marbled Pumpkins decorations, you know how much E enjoyed the craft. She kept asking for more, and since we already had just about all the pumpkins we could handle, I just put out the shaving cream and liquid watercolors with a stack of construction paper for her and sat back to watch her play with the materials in whatever way she wanted.

 

(E was 35 months old.)

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You’ll need:

• Shaving cream.
• Liquid watercolors.
• Eye droppers.
• Tray (optional).
• Construction paper.

 

 

 

Her exploration of the craft materials started when E ended our Drip Painting on Ice activity by suddenly requesting I put shaving cream on a towel for her. The ice cubes were forgotten, and she spent some time making prints with the plain shaving cream and scraping it off, just like we did when we did our marbling crafts. Of course, she also included some sensory exploration as well.

 

 

 

The next morning, E went for the construction paper again and asked to make more prints. We still had liquid watercolors in a muffin tin left over from the ice painting activity, so I let her use them with the eye droppers from that activity. {We had used liquid watercolors straight from the bottle for the Marbled Pumpkins craft.}

She actually sprayed the shaving cream on the tray herself for the first time! I was surprised and admittedly not purely happy, as I’d sort of counted on her not being able to work the mechanism yet until that moment 😉 Her hand did get tired after she’d covered about half the tray, and she asked me to do the rest.

 

 

She started dripping liquid watercolors on an area of the shaving cream with her eye dropper

 

 

and thought it was hilarious to put dots of shaving cream in her face.

 

 

She did one print where she scraped off the shaving cream like when we did the craft.

 

 

 

After that, she didn’t bother with the scraping anymore.

Instead, she let the shaving cream soak in properly while amusing herself with the back of the paper.

 

 

 

 

It still looked nice when she finally pulled the paper from the shaving cream, even if not too many colors had made it onto the sheet.

 

 

For the next sheet, she piled the watercolors on the back of the paper and watched them run into each other.

 

 

She ended the activity with more sensory exploration of the colored shaving cream.

 

 

I love the effect of the colors on the white shaving cream – beautiful every time!

 

 

I decided to simply let the sheets dry as they were, since E had chosen not to scrape the shaving cream off.

 

 

This is what they looked like after about 24 hours:

 

 

I quite liked the hazy white effect, especially on the sheet with all the liquid watercolors on the back, some of which had bled through.

Please note that the shaving cream should pretty much stay this way indefinitely but it does come off when handled. Of course, this was always meant to be all about the process – but I’m definitely still hanging up some of these for a while to remind us of all the fun!

 

 

 

Have you played with shaving cream lately? What does your child like to do with it? Write a comment below!

 

 

 

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