Painting with Bubbles

To make some bubble art, we mixed Dawn dish liquid with water and liquid water color paint in pie tins.  Then we gave each child a straw and showed them how to blow bubbles in the dish.  It does take some trial and error with the younger children.  A few of them do end up with some soap in their mouths.

(I read somewhere a trick of poking a pin hole in the bottom of the straw preventing the liquid from from going back up, but couldn't get this to work for us.  If you know of one, please let me know!)

Once the bubbles are high in the dish, the paper is placed lightly on top causing the bubbles to pop on the paper creating the painting.  

If you blow bubbles in a different color paint and use the same paper, you get a multi colored effect.  

I also wanted to do this with the big bubble wands and tempera paint, but it did not work.  I thought we could blow them onto mural paper.  I couldn't get the mixture to create bubbles so we just used the large bubble wands to make prints on the mural paper.  I am interested in hearing if anyone has gotten a similar activity to work.