In honor of International Mud Day, I recently did some experimenting.
I hope you will enjoy this mildly messy International Mud Day activity.
Finding the Right Kind of Dirt
Finding the right kind of dirt here to make a good consistency of mud was not easy. The dirt in my yard was hard as a rock so I stopped by my husbands job-site and filled up a bucket of dirt from there. The dirt is light and thick (almost a clay like texture) and had pebbles and rocks in the mix.
Preparing the Mud Paint
So with my nieces help, we chopped up the dirt into fine bits and threw out all the rocks. Once we had the dirt as fine as we could make it, we added some water to prepare our mud.
When the mud started to get a good texture (almost creamy) we spooned the mud into individual cups.
Our mud still had small stones in it but we went ahead and worked with what was ready. It seemed to add some texture into our mix which we liked. Next we added food color to each cup of mud. A lot of food color.
Now that we had our colorful shades of mud, we were ready to make a a few rainbow mud designs. We explored the process on different types of paper.
Painting with the Mud
We also tried making designs on cardboard pieces I had left over from the box challenge. The cardboard held up under the weight of the mud a little better plus it had a more natural look which I liked.
We used spoons to drop the paint on the canvas and to rub it around or just leave it in blobs. The mud had lots of texture in it so we liked trying different designs.
We had plenty of rainbow mud left over so we then decided to make a large mud mural. My niece particularly liked splattering the mud paint – and it splattered easily – whether you wanted it to or not.
And we still had some left over so we poured the left over over a plastic cup to make our own Tall “Mud” Pour Paintings.
It was a day of exploring and one of the most interesting discoveries that my niece liked was adding food color on the mud after it was on paper or cardboard. The food color would “crawl” out like little spider veins of color through the mud and she loved just watching how the colors flowed.
So this was our exploration of rainbow mud paint. We did all of these things with probably 4 to 6 cups of dirt which increased as we added water to make the mud. I had started out with 4 buckets full of dirt and only used less than half of one bucket so we had plenty to of dirt to do more if we had the time. There is always another day!