Marbled Shaving Cream Earth Art Project

With Earth Day approaching, the kids and I were recently scrolling through pictures of our past projects looking for inspiration for a craft to make this year. As we scrolled, one of the hooligans spotted pictures of a marbled-paper craft we had made with shaving cream and liquid watercolours for a past Valentine’s Day. The project was really beautiful and they asked me to stop scrolling so they could look at the photos. When they were admiring the pictures, a thought occurred to me: what if we used the the same process to make our Earth Day craft? The marbled effect might produce the same look that the Earth has when viewed from outer space.

I shared my thoughts with the children and they let out a resounding “YEAH!” because they love making marbled art with shaving cream. The process is so fascinating that it’s almost magical. No matter how many times we’ve done it before, we’re blown away every single time.

Let me show you how it’s done!

You’ll need:

• shaving cream
• liquid watercolours (or food colouring)
• baking sheet
• chopstick or stir stick (for swirling)
• white cardboard (or paper plate, white card stock, etc.)
• plate for tracing
• expired credit card or gift card (for scraping)

Directions:

First, you need to cut out your paper Earth. We traced a plate on our cardboard to make our circles perfect.

Next, have your child squirt shaving cream all over the baking sheet.

With an icing spreader or spatula, smooth out the shaving cream.

Then grab your liquid watercolours and drip them generously all over the shaving cream.

Now, things start to get really beautiful! Grab a chopstick or a stir-stick and swirl the watercolours all through the shaving cream. You want to cover up as much of the white as possible for this project.

Doesn’t it look cool? It’s a work of art already!

Once your shaving cream is good and swirly, lay your paper Earth on the surface and gently press it into the foam to ensure the colours transfer well.

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Now, pick at a bit of the edge of your paper until you can get a hold of it (it will be slippery) and slowly lift it up out of the foam.

We always like to examine things for a minute before moving on to the next step. We observe what happened with the foam on the baking sheet when we pressed the paper into it and we oooh and aaah over the colours streaking across our foamy paper.

Doesn’t it look fabulous?

Don’t worry that the swirls on your baking sheet are messed up.  You can still make more prints in the them. You may want to refresh things with a few more drops of colour if you’re planning to make several more prints.

Lay your paper Earth on a flat surface with the shaving cream side facing up.

And now, for the big reveal!

With the credit card, scrape all of the shaving cream off the paper to reveal your beautiful marbled Earth.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.