BIG Bubble Wrap Painting.

It’s Sunday afternoon – I have four kids who all want to kill each other, and a massive role of bubble wrap.

How can I combine these things into something good?

Painting and printing with bubble wrap is loads of fun, but I needed more than just ‘fun’. To change the mood from cranky, to calm, I needed amazingly epic and totally awesome.

So I did what any reasonable person would do – I covered our dining table with bubble wrap and let the kids loose with some paint.

Let’s do some really really BIG bubble wrap painting!

If you want to go big with some bubble wrap painting here’s what you’ll need:

• Lots of bubble wrap – enough to cover your entire work surface.
• Something to cover and protect your work surface if the bubble wrap doesn’t quite cover it.
• Tape – to keep the bubble wrap in place.
• Paint – we used washable fluro paints from Micador, but any tempera or washable kids paint will do.
• Containers for the paint
• Brushes in various sizes
• Large sheets of paper for taking prints.
• A damp clothe for messy fingers.

The first thing to do is cover the entire table with bubble wrap!

I had to tape a few pieces of bubble wrap together to get a large enough piece and it didn’t quite reach to the edges of the table so I covered the table with newspaper first, then taped everything in place. You need to make sure you tape the bubble wrap securely to the table so it doesn’t go flying.



The bumpy bubble wrap is a very interesting surface to paint on. It feels strange as you run your brush over it.

It was also a bit different to be allowed to paint on the whole table, and the kids quickly got busy covering the table in paint, instead of bickering with each other!



You can easily take prints straight off the bubble wrap – just paint your picture, press down a sheet of paper and lift it up. You’ll get a great dotty pattern on the paper.



Soon our dining table was covered in colour.

And of course once you are done creating, painting and printing, there is only one thing left to do… get your hands messy and start popping that bubble wrap!

It was very satisfying to run our hands through the squishy paint popping bubbles as our fingers slid over the surface, very, very satisfying!

When everyone was done and their hands were clean I did the easiest part of this activity – I unstuck the bubble wrap and newspaper and wrapped it into a big bundle to throw away. Clean up couldn’t be easier.

What do you do when you have a gaggle of grumpy kids?

If you need more ideas that will work with a multi-aged group of kids try these 20 ideas.