milk/shaving cream marbled paper

As I already mentioned, my 4 year old son also enjoys being creative. The attic is our space and he oftens asks (begs) to go up there.

A lot of the times we each do our own thing, me at my desk and he at his. But recently I’m on google+ and I discovered a community about kid’s crafts and that got me thinking that I actually need to guide him now and then a bit (because there are so many cool projects), I also still think he should sometimes be totally free to do what he wants, he sometimes amazes me with his creativity. Just yesterday he grabbed a piece of paper and laid it on his step which has blue anti slip circles and started drawing them over on the paper or the last couple of weeks he loves to punch holes in paper and then he folds the paper so you get holes in different places at once, and all that without me saying or showing him.

Past weekend we played around with some liquid watercolors ( which I made up with some foodcoloring and water), milk and detergent. (saw this originally here)

Poor milk in a shallow dish just enough to cover the bottom, drip in some watercolor as desired 

and now for the magic: grab a cotton swab, dip it generously in the detergent and place it next to a color and watch what happens. 

It’s fun playing around with and watching what happens, but it is also fun making prints with it, just place a watercolor paper on the surface, peel it off and let it dry.

The colors are subtle (in our experiment anyway). 
The paper does smell of milk, but according to other blogs this should disappear in a few days.
Needless to say he loved pooring and dripping and making prints.

I aslo bought some cheap shaving cream to play around with. Play is exactly what he did, he loved the texture of it, normally the plan was to create some kind of marble effect, but he was just mixing everything together, which was fine by me, he also took a cardboard roll and smeared it with the cream, took a colored paper and roled it on.

 Meanwhile I tried to produce some marbelized papers with it, it was fun for both of us and I have some great backgrounds to use as well. 

An added bonus is that this paper smells nice. I think I’m going to try and make some tools for marbelizing with some nails and give it another go.