Van Gogh’s Starry Night… Microwaved

Yesterday for my Tuesday art class at our CC group, I taught the kids about Van Gogh. We discussed his life, art, impressionist style and my favorite painting of his, Starry Night. I explained that he used oil paint on canvas and how the oils give the painting a really neat texture. Since I’m NOT giving 4-8 year olds oil paints to work with, I came up with a fun way to let them recreate Starry Night with texture.

Puffy paint! I went through a few homemade puffy paint recipes and this is the one I liked and used because it could be microwaved and dried in 30-45 seconds! For kids this was perfect because they could feel the dried texture within minutes of making it. Oil paints take a very long time to dry, 1-2 weeks! Parents not having to take wet paintings home also was a big plus.

Puffy Paint Recipe:

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon baking powder
Water
Paint or food coloring

Mix the first three ingredients and then add in water a little at a time until the consistency is about that of pancake batter.

Here is an example of the puffy paint after microwaving for 30-45 seconds on high so you can see the texture.

I used a quadruple batch because I can have up to 16 kids sometimes. I did two of these big batches one for yellow and one for blue. The yellow I added some clear glow paint to so the kid’s moon and stars would glow.

I put the paint in small plastic zipper bags and sealed. When it was time to paint I just snipped off the corner of the baggie and let the kids use the bags to pipe the paint where they wanted it.

First I let the kids draw their version of Starry Night on their piece of blue paper and then they used the blue and yellow puffy paint for texture.

Here are some examples of before and after microwaving.

I loved how they turned out and I think the kids had fun too! These are some but not all of the finished products.

Thanks for stopping by!
Johanna 🙂