Pipette Drip Painting is such a fun alternative to painting with brushes. It’ s super quick and easy to set up, is open ended and allows kids to develop fine motor skills, and explore colour mixing and pattern making.
We’ve used fine motor pipette drip painting to make these gorgeous looking hearts. These pretty painted hearts are a great addition to our Valentine Crafts and Mother’s Day Gift Ideas.
Supplies For Pipette Drip Painting
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- Paper Towels US / UK
- Scissors
- Pipettes US / UK
- Water Colours or Acrylic Paint US / UK
- Large Tray US / UK
How To Set Up A Pipette Drip Painting Activity For Kids
To minimise mess and protect the work surface from bleed through paint it’s a good idea to do the whole activity on a large flat tray. It also means the kids can go to town adding as much paint as they like.
Start out by cutting out heart shapes ready to colour. We used paper towels to make our heart paintings because they absorb the paint brilliantly. The down side of these is that they aren’t too strong and can sometimes break when you lift them to dry. If you’re wanting something robust and long lasting I’d recommend using the same technique detailed below but substitute the paper towels for cotton fabric instead.
Of course you don’t have to do heart shapes you can leave the paper towels in squares, use a long strip of them or cut any shape you want!
Prepare some paint colours in bowls by mixing each colour with a spoon or two of water until you get a nice runny paint. We used acrylic paints because they have a good vibrant colour but any water based paint will do.
You can buy pipettes to use really cheaply online and you might even be able to reuse some that have come from face serum bottles and the such like. Pipettes offer kids a great opportunity to develop fine motor skills and hand eye co-ordination.
Offer the children the pipettes and either show them how they work or let them discover for themselves through trial and error. Kids will probably enjoy sucking up and squirting out the paint a few times before they even get to painting their hearts!
What Are The Children Learning With Pipette Drip Painting Hearts?
Kids can enjoy drip painting hearts using the pipettes to apply the paint. They can apply a drip of paint at a time or a long squirt. Pipette drip painting is great for their fine motor skills and hand eye co-ordination.
They can have fun experimenting with different thicknesses of paint and absorption rates. They’ll be able to notice that very runny paint spreads very quickly and thicker paint travels through the paper towel more slowly and may even sit on the top.
As the children continue with their drip painting it’s fascinating to watch the paper towel absorb the paint and see how the colours spread, blend and bleed into each other.
Kids will be able to notice that the paper towel will eventually reach its saturation point and the paint will start to pool on top, underneath or roll off the sides.
How To Dry Pipette Drip Painted Hearts
If you want to keep the drip painted hearts to display or perhaps to stick on a card you’ll need to dry them. The paper towel is often quite fragile when it’s wet so I found the best way to dry them was to lift them off the wet tray with a spatula and leave them to dry on a few sheets of old newspaper. It’s worth lifting them off the newspaper every now and again too as they dry just to make sure they don’t stick!
Let us know how you get on with your heart art.
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