Toddler Safe Paint Recipe

I just sat down to get started on taking the pictures on today’s “Tuesday Tutorial” and then realised that pattern pieces and designs are currently sitting in my husband’s laptop bag, that is currently sitting in an office in North Sydney. Oops. I guess that’s what I get for scribbling down my ideas the moment inspiration strikes… and writing them on the back of his meeting notes! In my defence, I promise they did just look like scraps of paper.

So just a quickie today, and hopefully I should be able to get a more substantial tutorial up either tomorrow or Thursday, “Tutorial Thursday” sounds just as good, right?

My toddler loves to finger paint and get messy, but he’s still at that stage where as far as he’s concerned everything is edible, nothing is safe from going into his mouth, and so I’m somewhat hesitant in buying poster paints from stores without knowing exactly what’s in them and what he’s ingesting, and so this is my fix, non-toxic toddler safe paint where I know exactly what’s in it.

Fern’s Fabulous Recipe For Toddler Safe Paint

Throw two cups of any kind of flour you have laying around the house into a bowl, add COLD water until it forms a fairly smooth paste free of any big lumps, then slowly add freshly boiled (kettle is fine) HOT water, stirring constantly until it forms the right consistency - if you’re finger painting you’ll want it to be a little thicker, so add less water obviously.

Split the mix into however many colours you’d like, add a few drops of food dye to each pot and you have non-toxic completely toddler safe “paint”, they can eat as much as that like, and although it won’t taste fabulous (Declan gave up after one mouthful) you will know exactly what they’re putting in their mouth. Considering the amount of paint a toddler can go through as well, this is a far cheaper alternative to buying bottle after bottle of poster paint.

Only make up as much as you’ll need for each paint session as it doesn’t keep for more than 24 hours without going crunchy and hard. You can see some of my son’s finished artwork using the flour paint here, these were several months ago and they still look just as good now, you can’t tell that they weren’t made using “real” paint.