Homemade Bubble Bath Paint

This homemade bubble bath paint takes less than five minutes to prepare, and it only requires a few simple ingredients that you probably already have! What a great way to make bath time more fun for your kids!

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I don’t know what bath time looks like at your house, but at our house, it’s carried out with almost military precision.

We have four daughters, and all but our eight-month-old have long hair that needs to be untangled daily. (Our eight-month-old will get there too—she was born with just as much hair as her sisters were.)

With so much hair-washing to do, we’ve actually had to divide bath time into two shifts. So it can be easy for us to forget, as we’re trying to rush through bath time and get everyone into bed by 7:30 PM, that baths are supposed to be fun for kids.

I’ve been trying to relax a bit lately and find ways to incorporate more fun into our daily schedule. Of course, we do crafts and other fun activities together (many of which I’ve published on this blog), but with four young kids at home, I sometimes feel like a drill sergeant when I’m trying to uphold our routine.

With all the chaos that having a large family brings, it’s important for us to slow down and remind ourselves of what’s important. And creating fun memories together is at the top of that list!

So I remembered that a few years ago, one of our girls had been given some bath time finger paint in her Christmas stocking and loved it. And of course, I immediately thought, “I’m sure we could make that ourselves!”

As it turns out, not only is it possible, but it’s also really simple to do. And most importantly, our girls loved our homemade bath paint just as much—if not more—than the store-bought one from a few years ago!

Required Ingredients

Here’s what you’ll need to make your own DIY bath paints using cornstarch and bubble bath liquid:

• Baby bubble bath (ours was a bubble bath and soap combo)
• Cornstarch
• Water
• Liquid watercolours or food colouring (I prefer to use liquid watercolours because they’re washable)

You should also keep an ice cube tray on hand to hold all your bath paints and make them easy to transport.

How to Make Homemade Bubble Bath Paint (Step-by-Step)

1. Combine Water & Bubble Bath

Pour ¼ cup of bubble bath and 1 tablespoon of water into a small bowl and use a spoon to mix them together.

2. Add Cornstarch

Add 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and stir until combined. The mixture should look a bit bubbly, as pictured below.

At this point, feel free to test the mixture using a paintbrush to see how thick it is. I like to keep ours pretty runny, but if you’d prefer a thicker paint, add cornstarch in small increments until your paint has the desired consistency.

3. Divide Mixture

Divide the mixture into as many colours as you’re planning on creating and pour each one into a separate cavity of the ice cube tray.

We divided ours into fourteen so we could fill every cavity of the ice cube tray, but you can choose to make as few or as many colours as you like.

4. Add Colours

Add a bit of food colouring of liquid watercolour paint to each ice cube cavity and stir the paint using a paintbrush.

We created many shades of pink because we knew our girls would love them, but feel free to use fewer colours and/or encourage your kids to create their own colours by combining the ones you create!

Once you’ve added all the colours, run a bath and let your kids have fun painting! Our girls immediately went for the red and pink tones!

Our four- and five-year-old mostly painted the walls and bathtub, but our two-year-old decided to test whether it could be used as body and face paint.

In case you were wondering—it can (and our five-year-old immediately started doing it too). But I would definitely recommend washing it off with soap before letting anyone get out of the bathtub!

Tips for Using Homemade Bubble Bath Paint

Which Colouring Should I Choose?

Depending on what you have at home, you can use either food colouring or liquid watercolour paint.

As mentioned above, I prefer to use liquid watercolour paint. I prefer it because the brand of paint I use is washable and I find that it doesn’t stain as much as food colouring—although food colouring shouldn’t stain either as long as you make sure to clean it up right away.

To be honest, I use liquid watercolour paints in pretty much everything I make that that calls for food colouring (as long as it doesn’t need to be taste-safe). It comes in large bottles and in the long run, it’s way more cost-efficient than constantly buying tiny bottles of food colouring.

The fact that they’re washable is just a bonus. If you do a lot of crafts and activities with your kids, I highly recommend buying a set!

If, however, you’re not ready to invest in liquid watercolours but you’re nervous about using food colouring because you’re afraid that it won’t come off, try adding fewer drops the first time you use it to make bath paints. This will create pastel tones instead of vibrant ones like the ones we made.

Then, test how well it washes off after bath time before deciding whether to add more next time!

Will the Bath Water Become Filthy?

Yes, it definitely will—especially if your kids, like ours, use their paints like this:

(At least, they had fun, right? That’s what matters.)

Since these paints do make the bath water filthy, I recommend letting your kids play with them at the beginning of bath time, and replacing the bath water when it’s time to wash up.

We have four girls with lots of hair, so we usually let them play while we’re untangling their hair. (And if your kids have lots of hair too, here are some tips to help you manage it and make bath time stress-free!)

I hope your kids love this bath paint recipe as much as ours did! We’ll definitely be using it a lot!

Related Activities for Toddlers

Looking for more fun things to do with your toddler? Check out these articles:

• Taste-Safe Sensory Foam for Babies & Toddlers
• How to Make Edible Water Beads for Sensory Play
• Coloured Moon Sand (Taste-Safe!)

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