8 art supplies you can make at home

Featured on treehugger.com

Kids can go through a large amount of art supplies. It's wonderful to see them expressing their creativity, but keeping up with the demand can mean spending lots of money and sending too much disposable packaging into the trash.

Fortunately, many art supplies can be made at home using ingredients you already have. From paint to clay, beads to glue, you can whip up some new art materials in no time.

The following list of homemade art supplies comes in handy when you need an easy solution to bored kids trapped inside by cold or rainy weather or just when you reach the bottom of the paint jar. Most of these materials can be made with your kids, so it's a great way to introduce a DIY ethic and encourage making things from scratch.

These ideas are great for crafty adults too!

Paint

There are many different types of paint that you can make at home from thinner watercolor-like paints to thick-textured puffy paints. All that you need is in your cupboard and fridge. Ingredients like milk, flour, salt, water and some food coloring will have you painting.

Check out this recipe for condensed milk tempera paint and this one for flour and salt puffy paint to get you started.

Play dough

If you've ever made an art material at home, it was likely play dough. The favorite play clay is surprisingly simple to make and, in my experience, lasts even longer than the store bought kind. What's especially nice about making it yourself is that you can completely customize the colors.

There are several recipes out there for making play dough and everyone has their favorite. Some require cooking, while others don't. Here's a basic foolproof recipe that I love.

You can use essential oils to make lovely scented play dough or add some glitter to make it extra special.

Sidewalk chalk

If you do a lot of crafting at home, you probably have most of the ingredients for a batch of sidewalk chalk. During the spring and summer months, it's easy to go through many sticks of the stuff. Making them at home lets you produce a big batch that will last you for weeks of outside drawing time.

For the chalk you'll need molds for setting the shape, but that can be anything like toilet paper and paper towel rolls, wrapping paper tubes or even those narrow tubes that aluminum foil or parchment paper is wrapped around.

Check out this recipe to assemble the ingredients and start making chalk.

Click here to read the full article.