Salad Spinner Art

I’m so excited to share this fun and easy art technique with you today! We’re making homemade spin art with nothing more than paint and a common gadget that you may have tucked away in the back of a kitchen cupboard.

Spin art is created when different colours of paint are dripped onto a canvas and the canvas is placed on a spinning turntable. When the turntable is spun at a high speed, the paint is forced out to the edges of the canvas, creating a stunning design.

To create this kind of art at home, I’m happy to tell you that you don’t need a fancy spinning turntable—you can use an inexpensive salad spinner!

Yep! These gorgeous pieces were all made by preschoolers, using a salad spinner that I picked up for a couple of bucks at a second hand store. How cool is that?

Let me show you how it’s done!

You Will Need:

• salad spinner
• paint (acrylic craft paint or tempera paint)
• paper plate
• pencil and scissors

Instructions:

1. Remove the basket from your salad spinner and place it on top of a paper plate. Trace around the bottom of the basket and cut out the circle that you traced. This will be your canvas. 

Place the basket back into the salad spinner and set your paper plate circle inside. 

Now your child can squeeze several colours of paint onto the paper plate. Squeezing paint from a bottle is a great way for kids to strengthen their hand muscles.

2. When you’re happy with the amount of paint you have on your plate, place the lid on your salad spinner and spin, spin, spin!

Your children will love this process! It’s great for gross motor skills, as it takes coordination and strength to get the salad spinner spinning quickly. The faster you can spin it, the more interesting your spin art will be.

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3. Once you’ve worked your salad spinner up to a good speed, release the handle and let it slow down until it stops spinning. Then, remove the lid to see your creation!

4. Because you can’t see what’s happening inside the salad spinner when it’s spinning, it’s a surprise every time you remove the lid.  Each and every piece of spin art will be different than the one before. I love that!

How you distribute your paint on the plate will determine the finished look of your project. Large puddles of paint will result in big, solid blocks of colour spread out across the plate. Smaller, random drops of paint all over the plate will result in fine lines of colour sprayed out to the plate’s edge.

And of course, the more colours you use, the more detailed your spin art will be.

Play around the placement of your colours and experiment with different colour combinations to see how many different looks you can create.

Happy spinning!