Homemade Paint: Melted Candy Watercolors

Make sweet smelling homemade paint with just melted candy.

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Once Halloween rolls around and your house is being over run with candy and candy wrappers you will know what to do with all those candy! Rather than eating them or throwing them away much to the chagrin of your children stash away a bunch and make PAINT. We love homemade paints here.

All of our previous candy activities for kids here. Visit my friend Allison’s landing page for a ton of candy activities from a bunch of bloggers.

Materials

Laffy Taffy
Microwavable Containers
Water

Start off with sorting your candy. If the kids can resist the urge to scarf down the candy, enlist their help. The children really work on their fine motor skills while peeling off the wrapper. They brush up on their color recognition while they sort the candy by color.

I did not take any shots of the melting process inside the microwave well because the pictures almost never come out clear. So I’m just going to use words and you will have to read. HA! Gotcha! No more scrolling down pictures.

Homemade paint recipe : Candy Paint

So for every 4 pieces of Laffy Taffy candy I used 2 TBSP of water. I placed the candy and the water in a glass bowl and microwaved them for about 45 seconds.

Once all the candy melts you will be left with smooth looking, gorgeous candy colors. {Don’t you just love simple homemade paint? I mean, you know what just went in there! Taste-safe homemade paint safe even for babies! }

If you either add more candy, less or water OR microwave the contents for a shorter interval you will be left with slightly gunkier colors with some candy bits floating around. While they are ok to use the smoother and clear the colors are the better they flow on paper. Having said that i like the thickness of the paint if made with slightly more candy or less water. Please try both and see which one you like the best. Try using 6 candy bits ( 6 Laffy Taffys) and add the same 2 TBSP of water ad microwave for the same 45 seconds and see the difference. Experiment by varying the water, candy and microwave time. Homemade paint is your ideal candidate for experimentation. After trying a variety of combinations we liked this combination the best.

Note: If you going by our recipe of 4 candy bits and 2 tbsp of water try not doubling the recipe. 8 candy bits and 4 tbsp of water yields still gunkier paint( which are thick and have a lot of thickness and texture. You will like that too!) But if you are looking for translucent, sweet smelling water colors then try doing the 4 candy bits and 2 tbsp of water twice. Or add slightly more than 4 tbsp of water for the 8 candy bits.

Since the candy contains corn syrup and gelatin you will see that this candy paint gets thicker over time. Simple add 1 TBSP of warm water and you are good to go. The colors are so vibrant by themselves (yikes!) so there is no need to add extra colors. The presence of corn syrup makes the paint so glossy and shiny.

Let your art to dry for a while. Come back and sniff and relish in the amazing candy paint you and your kids just created. Now your art not only looks good but smells good as well.

Thanks for reading

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