I can’t tell you how much we love our DIY watercolor pens!
I almost always choose watercolors for my kids to paint with because I have a four year old {who loves to paint} and a one year old {who loves to eat paint}. It would be easy to stop painting, but we found a super easy solution that has stopped my son from eating the paint…as enthusiastically! <—BUT our watercolors are safe for him to put in his mouth anyway!
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We first came up with the idea to make DIY watercolor pens after a long trip home from Texas.
We are used to traveling with our kids and we were thrilled to find these awesome water pens from Melissa and Doug. These books are a must-have if you travel with young kids – even my one year old loved them! They’d be great for restaurants, too. My son absolutely LOVED the car version, and I can’t even tell you how thrilled I am to grab the fairy version for my daughter <—I haven’t seen this one before!!
But, like any toy, my kids started to tire of the books a bit, so instead of putting them away for our next trip, I decided to add something to the pens to bring new life to one of our favorite activities!
How to Make DIY Watercolor Pens
They say the secret is in the sauce, but this time, the secret is in the water! Fill up your water pen with water {I know…obvious, but I have to write it!} and add a few drops of food coloring. We used about four drops of gel food coloring which gives it this super rich color.
After a few strokes on the paper, the pens let out gorgeous streaks of color! They really are the perfect watercolor pens because they don’t drip and they are super easy to clean up. Once your done painting, just rinse out the pens and rub the tips of the brushes a few times with your fingers.
The turquoise washed away easily, but the purple (as purple always does) stained the brush fibers slightly. The food coloring did fully rinse out so we could use the pens again with the book without any staining.
I love when both of my kids can come together and play, but watching them paint together is really special. They tried painting objects together and my son tried mimicking my daughter’s strokes on the paper – it’s just so much fun to watch while they are learning together!
The best part about this Melissa and Doug hack?
It takes minutes to put together and the clean up is a breeze <—that’s what we are all about!!
Love watercolors, too? Check out how we write secret messages to our kids with watercolors and jump on over to our Facebook page to tell us your favorite activities for kids!
What do you use to make the actual pen?!
In the post, there is a link to the pen that we use. It comes with one of our favorite Melissa and Doug activity books and we reused the pens to make watercolor pens 🙂 Hope that helps, Sally!
What a fun idea! We love our water pen books…but I know there is only so much longer they will be interested in the books we have. I will definitely be trying this with the pens!