Some people tend to lose their marbles, but not us! Instead, we use ours to paint with! :)
My mom kept my nephew Jett and niece Bren today and, as the cool aunt that I am, I whipped up a fun little craft project for them. I told Bren it might take us six whole hours to complete ("How much is that?" "It's like 4 Frozen movies." "Oh, ok.") but that was a bit of an exaggeration. I think we were done in under one hour so while it did kill a little bit of time, it didn't completely knock out the whole afternoon. But it was still fun and both kids enjoyed it so I'm sharing it with you in case you need to entertain some kids too!
You don't need much in terms of supplies. Just some craft paint, a bag of marbles, pool noodles (we only ended up using one), a canvas of some type, and a drop cloth or something to protect your floors. We painted out in the woodshop but we still put down a drop cloth to avoid too much of a mess. Not pictured is the small plastic bowl of water we used to clean our marbles as we went. You'll want to have that handy too.
While the kids picked out their paint colors - I let them choose three colors each - I cut up the pool noodle. First I used a knife to slice it into thirds and then I cut those three pieces down the middle lengthwise. It gave us six "marble slides."
I squirted out a little bit of paint near one end of each marble slide. I was careful not too squirt out too much because I didn't want it to drip out, but there needed to be enough for the marble to roll through and pick up.
Then came the fun part! The kids just took marbles, lined up their slides with their canvas, and let them roll through the paint and onto the blank canvas creating colorful streaks. I think the pictures will explain that better.
We used wood blocks as barricades so the marbles wouldn't roll all the way across the floor.
Action shot! That blue blur is a marble rolling across.
Jett really wanted to be too cool for this when I first told him we were going to do a craft project, but he probably got into more than Bren did! He liked to get a handful of marbles and send them down the slide one after the other while he moved the slide back and forth on the canvas. Bren was much more careful and took her time with each marble.
Another action shot! Do you see the orange blur right out of the slide?
Once they were satisfied with their paintings, they ran back inside to play and left me with the mess. So typical, right?
Here are their finished masterpieces! Their mom has a wall in their house where she displays their artwork. Wonder if these will make the cut??
You should try it out sometime. (And if you do, send me a picture!) Not gonna lie, I kinda wanted to make one of my own today but I only had two canvases. I do have that extra pool noodle though so maybe I'll make one later in the week...