Mesmerizing art in a cup. This is such fun (and highly addictive) activity! We tried it once and we knew we were hooked. It’s so easy.

First, you need to mix your paint. You need a cup and a Popsicle stick to stir it (for each color). Then take:

• acrylic paint
• little bit of water
• some dish-washing liquid

Mix it all together until it is not too thick and not too thin. You want it to float on the canvas. Do a couple and try it out.

Fyi: a lot of professionals use floetrol or some other medium to get the right consistency but for our preschool purposes, we did just water and dish soap and it worked great!

Take your cup and start adding the paint. Start with white/black and then start adding other colors, one by one. We filled large ketchup/Wilton bottles so the kids can squeeze the bottles easily and we can store them like that. The more colors you add (in small amount), the more cells you will create. Just play around with it.

Place the canvas on top of the cup, flip it over, wait a couple of seconds.. and abracadabra – lift the cup. Now is time to slowly tilt the canvas from side to side, making sure the paint fills the whole space. It is mesmerizing to watch. It changes in front of your eyes. You can see the cells appearing and getting bigger and bigger. Just take it slow and once you like it, stop. It is easy to keep turning it and breaking the cells all together.

I cannot even tell you how fun and relaxing it is. And how rewarding!

After we made some canvases, we moved onto experimenting with other media. We poured on CDs to make planets, wooden blocks, metal scrap pieces and tiles. I am sure we will discover more and more uses. We want to make our solar system on vinyl, we want to make 3D cake sculptures out of blocks, we want to make a huge cooperative canvas with several cups of paint, we want to add stencils on top of our art. I think we will be stuck on this medium for a while!