Splat Painting with Cotton Balls

Explore the world of color with this splat painting art activity and Eric Carle’s new book!

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Did you know that Eric Carle has published a new book? What’s Your Favorite Color? published THIS WEEK featuring an amazing collection of children’s book artists sharing (and illustrating!) their favorite colors.

Whether you have a toddler, preschooler, or older child, there is always room for exploring the fantastic world of color. We decided to celebrate this new book by making colorful art – by splatting paint!

My original idea for this splat painting was just as a fun colorful process art activity outside. And that’s how it started out… but my son turned it into so much more!

To prepare, I cut two lengths of easel paper and weighted them down with some toy cones (but rocks or similar would work well too). Then I poured some acrylic paint into paper plates and provided some cotton balls.

I invited my son to splat the paint onto the paper.

Obviously the cotton balls don’t bounce or slide – so it really doesn’t make too much mess. We did find that the more paint they had on – the better the splat!

The cotton balls can be re-splatted a few times if they have enough paint on them.

After a while, my son wanted to make this into a challenge, and drew measurement markers along the side of the paper, so that we could keep score of our points.

Next he added targets to aim for – that was a lot of fun – especially when he made them very small!

He went on to add shields and all kinds of other shapes, and the paper looked pretty full of color by the end of it! And amazingly, only three cotton balls were thrown off the paper!