Shaving cream marbling, yet again!

Yup.  We've been marbling with shaving cream again, so even though I've posted this process before, I thought I'd share it one more time.  As you can tell by my student's face above, it is rather fun.... 

My DragonWing Arts kiddos began by taping rectangles DIRECTLY ON THE TABLE, slightly larger than their papers. 

 Then, I let them squirt shaving cream into the rectangles.
They used way too much, but since I only paid $1 per can, I didn't care.

 The kids used cardboard rectangles to spread out the shaving cream to fill the taped rectangles.  It was kind of like frosting a cake.

We reviewed the color wheel and discussed what happens when complementary colors get mixed together.  Depending on the proportions, complementary colors mix together to make colors like baby poo brown, dead mouse gray, swamp water greenish brown, and all sorts of ugliness.  We didn't want to achieve those sort of colors in our marbling, so when the students squeezed liquid watercolors onto their shaving cream, they tried to keep the complementary colors away from each other.  But sometimes they ignored the rules, as in the purple and yellow next to each other below.

 We used plastic knives and forks to swirl the colors together.  I demonstrated how to swirl gently to keep the colors from getting muddy, but the kids really loved mixing them all together so they generally swirled them like crazy! 

Then, the kids put their papers face down on their swirled colorful wonderfulness, and pressed them into the shaving cream.

 Finally, cardboard rectangles were used again, this time to squeegee the shaving cream off of their papers to reveal the marbled patterns.  The kids then smoothed out the shaving cream into their rectangles on the table again, and repeated the process to create second pieces of marbled papers. 

Finally, we squeegeed the excess shaving cream off the table.  Some of it went into a bucket of water to dump in the sink, but since we don't have a sink in the room where the classes are held, some of the colorful shaving cream went into the garbage with the cardboard squeegees.  I'm betting the custodian was pretty confused by the colorful foam in the trashcan!  By the way, the kids' hands were quite colorful by the time we were done, but liquid watercolors are washable, unlike food coloring.  So while food coloring might work well, I don't advise using it! 

Below are the results of our marbling.  As you can see, some of them are a little muddier than others!  You'll have to wait a couple of weeks to see what we will be using the marbled papers for!!

 A few close-ups:

 I think this one below might be my example. 

 You can find other blog posts (from this blog) about marbling with shaving cream here, here, and here.  And some other fun with shaving cream, here.