What you need:
Food coloring (I used gel food coloring)
Choose your painting location–preferably in a contained space. We used the high chair. Easy to clean up, and the finger paint can’t run away and paint the wall.
Just mix up some colored yogurt (a small amount of food coloring in the yogurt), give the kid some paper, and let them go! You don’t need that much food coloring because when the yogurt dries, the color is actually darker on the paper than it is when it’s wet. Also, you don’t want the paint to be so dark that it stains the kid and whatever he touches.
Alternatively, give them the yogurt and stick them in the bathtub with no water and let them paint the walls. When they’re done, just let them have a bath. They’ll probably love washing the walls afterward, too, so this is double the activity.
This was Lewis’s first time finger painting, but he got the idea really quickly. Of course, plenty of the paint got into his mouth, but the beauty of this paint is that it’s okay to eat it! We used plain, unsweetened, unflavored yogurt, so it’s not so tasty on its own that the kid wants to eat it all and not paint with it.
Of course, you can adapt this activity to use what you have on hand. If you have pudding, use that. If you don’t have food coloring, use some cocoa powder to make brownish paint.
Cleanup is easy. Just use a washcloth/sponge, and soapy water. For the kid, depending on how messy he or she is, you might be able to wipe them down, or you might prefer to toss the kid into the bathtub. Because yogurt is a dairy product (and already sour-smelling to begin with), I advocate the bath afterward.
Lewis had fun painting (yes, he even said “painting”). It gave us about twenty minutes of fun, but this was our first foray into painting, and he’s only 18 months old. For his age, he paid attention for quite a long time. Older kids might last longer.
I was thinking of buying finger paints before I tried this, but I like this more because it’s free (as long as we already have the supplies on hand), and because it’s edible and washable. The paintings look nice when they’re dry, too!