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This is a little guide on finger painting without the mess in case either you or your child enjoys painting but doesn’t like to get mucky.

When my daughter Ellie was about 8 months old the thought of what she might do with paint scared us a little I admit.

Looking back, I would probably care a little less and embrace the mess that comes along with a small child especially when there is creativity afoot. However, we knew that painting would be something that she found fun and would be a stimulating experience so we felt we needed to suck it up and carry on.

We saw a nice idea on Pinterest where blobs of different coloured paint were put onto a canvas and a sheet of cling film wrapped over it.

For some extra protection to stop the paint leaking out you could use painters tape around the edges as well.

This worked well and Ellie had a lot of fun moving the paint around and seeing what patterns she could make.

However, she also was fascinated by the cling film as well as the paint and wanted to lift up the edges. A testament to her destructive personality!

As an added creative twist we also added a template of Ellie’s name done in masking tape and this could be peeled off afterwards. If you have a vinyl cutter (like we now have) you could do a much better job as we noticed there was a fair amount of bleed with our cheap masking tape.

This looked OK but needed a black fine liner pen just to really highlight the edges before we considered it complete and there we go, Ellie’s first painting which we put up on our study wall.

So 2 years later I thought I’d try this again and as expected Ellie enjoyed the experience but a little older and wiser she realised the paint was supposed to stay in the bag.