Edible Art

Edible Art

We celebrated Valentine's Day a week early at cMoe with "Be Mine Valentine." The theme this year was "We Heart Art." The day was filled with fun art projects such as DIY Valentines, a collaborative art project, and gel painting. My personal favorite activity was "edible art." This is a super fun and relatively easy activity that you can try at home! Check it out:

Supplies and Prep 

The day before, we iced some graham crackers with GFS cinnamon bun icing. Graham crackers made a nice sized canvas on which to paint. The icing is the same type  we use for our Gingerbread Workshop, because it gets very hard when dry and serves as a great "mortar." In this case, when dry, it makes a nice smooth, white canvas. 

I experimented with several different types of "paint." There are many recipes online for edible paint. One suggestion was gel icing mixed with vanilla extract. This is what you see in the first picture. It worked well, but is a more expensive option since gel icing containers are so small. Ultimately, I ended up mixing the same GFS icing with food coloring and water (to thin it out), and it really worked great! We purposely only gave the kids red, yellow and blue to serve as a lesson about primary colors and color mixing. 

Finally, you will need a tablecloth, paper plates, and new paintbrushes. 

The Process

(This is actually my cousin Norah above, captured in the moment just before working her artistic magic!) 

We went around the room and gave each kid a small squirt of each color. (As you can see, I had the icing in bags. If I did it over again, I'd use squeeze bottles - way less messy!) We went over how to mix each primary color to create secondary colors, and encouraged them to mix colors on their paper plates. 

Note: It is perfectly fine to eat the painting while it is still wet, but if you want to wait for it to dry, it takes about an hour. 

The Finished Products

As usual, the kids' results were beautiful and reminded me again how I am always amazed and impressed with children's artistic abilities and visions! Check them out! 

 

 More Ideas

Of course I had to try the project, too! The example on the left is my Jackson Pollack-inspired work, which I then turned long-ways and propped up to see how the colors would run and mix together. Can you imagine what a messy kid I was?? You could definitely use this project to teach various techniques of specific artists - maybe use toothpicks to discuss pointillism? A few of the kids' pieces were very Mondrian-esque, too. It's probably pretty obvious that I just LOVED this project and will probably repeat it for camp!

Thanks for stopping by!