Ice painting is a fun and easy art activity to do at home with kids. It's interesting to see the colors mix as the ice melts, you can create fun patterns!
Ice cube painting is easy and fun
My kid loves ice painting! His favorite part is mixing all the colors together at the end, especially when the ice starts to melt.
As a mom, I love ice painting with my kid because it's super easy to set up, it is engaging, and we aren't left with more artwork to hang on the fridge.
How to Paint Ice
If you are wondering how to paint ice cubes and make it fun, here are a few tips.
Place the ice cubes in a big shallow tray. A big shallow tray gives you lots of room to ice paint, while making sure it's not tricky to use the paint brush.
It's fun to use several colors, but if you can, use white as one of the colors. It's easy for the colors to blend when ice painting, so you'll get pretty white swirls.
What do you need for this ice painting activity
- A big tray
- Water based paint (we used this washable paint)
- Several different paint brushes
- Several different paint colors
You can see that we used a baking pan for this activity. This is an old baking pan that we don't bake food in anymore. I'm telling you this because even after we washed the pan, the washable paint smell lingered in it.
What kind of paint to use on ice
We used this washable paint in the pictures. The color stuck to the ice nicely when we first painted it on.
And as the ice started melting, and we started mixing the colors together, we started seeing the colors started to run together. My kid really enjoyed watching the paint blend when the ice started melting.
I would recommend using a water based paint for the ice painting.
Does ice cube painting get messy?
We did this activity inside, and it didn't make too much of a mess at first. Because everything is contained in the tray, I wasn't worried about the paint getting everywhere.
But at the end, when the ice had started to melt, the paint would splatter when he swirled his paint brush around very quickly. It wasn't a huge mess, but be prepared for paint to splash a bit.
Ice painting for toddlers
My son was 4 years old when we first did this art activity, but you could definitely do ice painting with a younger child.
For a younger child, I would recommend doing this activity outside, if possible. I would also suggest wearing a smock!
If you love different painting ideas, another one of our favorite activities is painting with feathers.
We really hope you enjoy this fun painting idea!