*Easy* Homemade Sparkle Paint

The boys have decided to do a lot of painting with their easel lately...yet they became super bored with the same type of paints.  We used our water colors, tempera paints, paint brushes, Q-Tips, cotton balls, etc.  Then they asked to paint with glitter.  I love glitter.  It always adds that extra sparkle to any project...even if it gets everywhere, and we are cleaning it for days.

When we use glitter with tempera paint, it never seems to really shine.  It surely gives the paint texture (which is always fun), but not enough shine for us.  I happened to have some left over hair gel from our sensory bags, and decided to get creative.  It couldn't hurt anything, right?  Here is what we did:

A glob of hair gel
A pinch of water color paste
A generous shaking of glitter

Mix it all together...and paint!

When we started this, I did not expect this to really work well.  I thought for sure it would flake off the paper, or not dry correctly.  Weren't we surprised when the paintings turned out like this:

Not only did the paint smell great, it stuck to the paper amazingly well, and even dried with the same sparkle that it had while wet!  There was no fading at all!

The boys now love their sparkle paint, and I am excited to have something else to add to our paint collection.  I honestly think after this next batch of tempera paint is used up, I am going to start making all of our own paints.  :)  

Have a great day, and happy painting!