Bubble Painting Activity for Kids

Updated June, 2019

Painting with bubbles is a fun alternative to watercolor painting that kids adore. They’ll love creating imaginative bubble art with this colorful craft! Plus it’s super easy to set up!

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Kids love bubbles, but sometimes it gets tiring blowing them all the time. I decided to try some bubble activities with my kids and our favorite quickly became bubble painting.

It was so much fun and my kids loved making bubble art! I enjoyed it too because it was less messy than regular watercolor paints. Just make sure you don’t use too much food coloring or the

Painting with bubbles is super easy too and will keep your kids occupied for a long time. I’ll show you how to paint with bubbles here.

Bubble Art Supplies

What do you need for bubble painting?

• colored bubbles* (we used this easy recipe with dish soap, corn syrup, water, and food coloring)
• plastic cups or containers for different colors
• straws
• paper or card stock (preferred)
• painters tape, optional

*If you don’t want to make your own bubbles, you can add a couple drops of food color to a container of storebought bubbles, cap, and shake well. You’ll need a separate container for each color.

How to Paint with Bubbles

Mix your colored bubble mixture using different colors and pour each into a container.

I put out a popsicle mold set to hold our colored bubbles. This kept colors separate, while still providing a tall enough slot for our straws to stay put! I’m really glad we used it, as it worked really well. If you don’t have one, you can use plastic cups, tupperware containers, dixie cups, mason jars, etc.

Just a quick note: small children may want to drink the bubbles because that’s kinda what you do with straws, so you will want to supervise this bubble painting activity with really young children. Though in my experience, once they try it, they don’t again because homemade bubble solution doesn’t taste very good!

Use paper or (if available), card stock is a great option because it holds up better under the liquid than regular paper.

One fun way to add more creativity to this bubble art is to use painters tape to map out designs. We chose a cross as an easy design.

Make sure you press the tape down firmly, or the bubbles will sneak in under your tape.

We like to do bubble painting with straws because it’s such a fun easy way to blow the bubbles and provides better control than regular bubble wands.

Have your children dip the end of the straw into the bubble solution.

Then aim the straw toward the paper and blow!

Bubble Painting Tips

For bright colors:

If you want really bright colors, you will need to use a lot of color in your bubbles.

My daughter insisted that pastel colors are for princesses, so we didn’t use very much color in ours. Our colors look bright in their containers, but as you will see from our final pics, they actually turn out much lighter than you think they would. Princess Izzy was delighted with how hers turned out!

We tried another batch later with brighter colors and you can see how our bubble painting turned out:

For less mess:

I recommend having your children paint with bubbles outside for the least mess. You can do it inside, but you will want to supervise more closely in case they decide to have a colorful bubble fight!

More bubble art creativity:

You can also use stickers for more fun and creativity with this bubble activity. I thought it would be fun to add letter stickers to one painting, though they wouldn’t come off for the neat effect I was hoping for. What do you think?

After your kids finish painting with bubbles, allow it to dry. You can leave it outside in the sun or bring it inside. It only took about thirty minutes for ours to dry outside. Make sure your designs are completely dry before removing your painter’s tape, if you used any, as it can cause your paper to tear if not.

I love, love, love how this easy bubble painting activity turned out!

I plan to frame my children’s bubble art and use it around the house. Overall we had so much fun, and my daughter is already asking when we will be making some more! We have plenty of bubbles left, so it will much quicker for next time.

Will your kids prefer pastel or bright colors when they try this bubble painting activity?