Marble painting. It’s one of those classic painting crafts and it’s all over the blogosphere but we’d never tried it before. R (3) had been asking to do this for some time and so last week we finally tried it out – with some unexpected, but very beautiful results.

To do marble painting, you will need:

• Paint
• Marbles
• Small containers to hold the paint (We used plastic cups)
• Paper
• A large deep container – We used a plastic storage tub. You could also use a cardboard box or even a baking tray. Basically, you need something that is light enough for your child to hold and move around and which has sides deep enough to contain the marbles as they roll around.
• We also used some tongs but this is optional

R chose to use green and blue for this painting.  We mixed several shades of these two colours by adding some white paint.

Next, we placed some paper into the plastic tub, and dropped a marble into each cup of paint.

R then shook the cups so that each marble was coated in paint.

R used tongs to take a marble out of one of the cups and drop it onto the paper. Next he picked up the tub and began rolling the paint-covered marble over the paper.

R really enjoyed this process. He was very quiet while creating this artwork. I think he found it quite relaxing to watch the patterns appear as the marble rolled around the tub. He chose to use just one marble at a time before moving on to the next colour. When he had decided that his first picture was complete, I asked him what he thought might happen if he used all the marbles at once.

R was very excited by the idea but he didn’t want to just use all of the MARBLES at the same time. He also wanted to use all of the PAINT at the same time. He emptied all the cups of paint onto the paper and began to roll the marbles around.

Two wonderful things happened. Firstly, the painting was very dramatic with lots of parralel lines since there were several marbles rolling around simultaneously. Secondly, all that paint started swirling and mxing into the most beautiful patterns.

Isn’t it beautiful? R’s choice of blue and green for these paintings really made them look like images of planet Earth, especially the photo below which reminds me of a satelite image taken from space.

Here’s another image from the other side of the page.

Marble painting was a big hit with R. It was very simple to set up and the clean up was the quickest and easiest of any art project we’ve ever done. You have to love that! Maybe we’ll try this again sometime using more colours.

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