This summer has been especially rough when it comes to ideas for keeping busy. With many parks and pools closed, it seems like it’s up to mom (or dad, babysitter, grandma, etc.) to come up with fun ideas for outdoor play. Last week, the kids and I made sidewalk chalk paint, and it was a blast! It only took three ingredients and a few minutes to mix up a batch. It really turned out to be a great activity, so I thought I would share it with you all. Check out this post for the recipe and to see how our DIY sidewalk chalk paint turned out.

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DIY Sidewalk Chalk Paint

I’ve seen the idea of making sidewalk chalk paint floating around social media this summer, so we decided to give it a go ourselves. I asked around for a recipe, and looked at a few suggestions. I ended up finding one that worked really well, but needed a slight tweak. It took us about 10 minutes to make our sidewalk chalk paint, including the time that it took to mix the colors. My kiddos are 1 and 3, so activities are always subject to their short attention span. This one kept us busy for over an hour when you combine making the paint, playing with the paint, and clean up. That’s pretty good! They had a lot of fun, and were excited to show Daddy their artwork.

DIY Sidewalk Chalk Paint Recipe

The recipe itself is super simple:

• 3/4 Cup Corn Starch

• 1 Cup Water

• Food Coloring

We got a recipe from our cousin that was a 1:1 ratio water and corn starch. That was really runny, so I ended up adding more cornstarch. I think the 3:4 ratio worked better. It was still pretty thin, and not a thicker paint consistency. The colors mixed in really well though, and the results were great.

Mixing Colors in your DIY Sidewalk Chalk Paint

We ended up making 8 colors just because our mini loaf pan was a convenient paint tray.

I used red, yellow, blue, and green food coloring to mix our colors because it was what I had on hand. We ended up with a pretty rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and white.

Each color took a different amount of dye, so you can just experiment and have fun with it. It was anywhere from 5 to 15 drops for ours. We talked about color mixing as we went for a little bit of learning through play with my preschooler.

Painting with you DIY Sidewalk Chalk Paint

Like I mentioned, this paint is pretty runny. Some simple paint brushes work really great for applying it. (You can get 12 pack of 1″ brushes on Amazon for around $7.) I’ve also seen people use squirt bottles, which may work better for writing or making lines. We went with broad color designs, so the brushes worked great.

The paint went on pretty translucent, but it dried like nice thick chalk. It showed up great, and then washed off of the patio (and the kids!) really easily.

We had fun painting and dumping on our patio.

Here are a few favorite pictures from our DIY sidewalk chalk paint adventure.