Plate Smoosh Planet Painting + Crafts • Capturing Parenthood

Do you have a favorite planet (aside from Earth, of course)? I’ve always been partial to Saturn – there’s just something special about all of those rings. And I’ve been a fan of Jupiter’s largest moons (Europa, Callisto, Io, and Ganymede) since childhood – mostly because they look incredibly cool…but also because they have really fun names. 🙂 Needless to say, we’ve spent a lot of time exploring all of the planets in our solar system this month…so it was only natural that we create some cool planetary crafts as well. As you likely already know, we painted each of the planets on small rocks, for our Space Sensory Bin…but we also wanted to do something on a larger scale. The end result? Plate Smoosh Planet Painting + Crafts!

Did you know that you can create magnificent masterpieces by simply squishing paint between two paper plates? I had no idea until I stumbled across a Plate Smooshing post, over on @artwiggles Instagram feed. I immediately added the colorful idea to our to-do list. Cut to a few months later…and this clever idea popped right into my head, while I was brainstorming various ways to paint planets. I just knew that we had to give it a try…and I’m seriously over-the-moon excited with how they all turned out!

Plate smoosh painting is so much fun! You’ve got to try it! We can’t get enough of this incredibly cool art process. And the gorgeous, textured planets that we created…well, they transformed into some pretty stellar planet crafts (if I do say so myself). 🙂

Plate Smoosh Planet Painting

Supplies:

Acrylic Paint (white, black, red, orange, yellow, green, dark blue, and light blue)
16 Paper Plates
National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Space by Catherine D. Hughes (optional)

Instructions:

We used our daughter’s National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Space as a reference, when it came to selecting paint colors for each of our planets. So, we grabbed our book, our paint, and our paper plates and we started making our way through the planets…from those nearest the sun…to those farther away.
We found that the plate smoosh painting worked the best when we used two or three colors of paint. We used the following paint combinations for each planet:
- Mercury – black and white
- Venus – yellow and white (with white being the more dominant color)
- Earth – green, blue, and white
- Mars – red, orange, and white (with red being the more dominant color)
- Jupiter – orange and white (with a little bit of red to create the Great Red Spot)
- Saturn – yellow and white (with yellow being the more dominant color)
- Uranus – light blue and white (with light blue being the dominant color)
- Neptune – dark blue and white (with a little bit of black to create the Great Dark Spot)
Working with one planet at a time, squirt the paints onto the backside of a paper plate. Place the backside of another paper plate down on top of the paint.
Pick the two paper plates up and smoosh them together between your hands…spin and slide them around!
Once you’re finished smooshing, carefully pull the two paper plates apart. You should now have two identical planets. Set them aside to dry completely (dry time will vary depending on the amount of paint you use).
Repeat the same process until you’ve created all eight planets in our solar system.
If your little ones are having a blast (like we were) why not let the fun continue?!? Grab some more paper plates and get creative! We decided to use some red, orange and yellow paint to make a blazing hot sun.

Plate Smoosh Planet Crafts

Now that you have two sets of beautiful planets…one question remains…what should you do with them? 🙂 We fell in love with the colorful marbled effect and terrific textures that the plate smoosh painting created. So, we obviously had to find a way to display our stunning planetary creations. And we came up with a fun Planet Poster Board Craft, as well as a stellar Planetary Banner Craft!

Planet Poster Board Craft

Supplies:

Plate Smoosh Planets (from above)
Black Poster Board (we bought ours at Hobby Lobby)
Scissors
Glue Stick
Yellow Tempera Paint
Star-Shaped Cookie Cutters
White Puffy Paint
Oil Pastels

Instructions:

If you used dinner-sized paper plates to create your plate smoosh planets, you will not be able to fit them all onto a standard size of poster board. We decided to cut our planets down in size…and we tried our best to make them relatively accurate in size, in comparison to one another (but obviously not to scale). Jupiter is the largest of all of the planets, followed by Saturn. Uranus and Neptune come next, and they are both pretty similar in size. Then Earth and Venus (which are also pretty similar in size). Next comes Mars…and the smallest planet in our solar system is Mercury.
Once you have all of your planets cut, lay them out on the black poster board, until you find an orientation that is pleasing to you. Use a glue stick to adhere the planets to the poster board.
Now, it’s time to add rings to Saturn and Uranus! Grab the white puffy paint and carefully pipe white rings around Saturn (we decided to do three rings, but you can add as many as you would like, or as many as space allows). We piped one white ring of puffy paint around Uranus, and we made sure that the ring was vertical, since Uranus is tipped on its side.
Set the poster board aside until the puffy paint dries completely.
Grab some colorful oil pastels and label each of the planets. Feel free to write a title on top too – we went with The Planets! 🙂
Now…for the fun part! Pour a thin layer of yellow tempera paint into the bottom of a bowl. Have your kiddos dip star-shaped cookie cutters into the yellow paint, and then press the paint-coated stars down onto the poster board – filling any blank spaces.
Set the poster board aside to dry once again, and then hang it up on display for everyone to enjoy!

Planetary Banner Craft

Supplies:

Plate Smoosh Planets (from above)
White Construction Paper or Card Stock
Scissors
Glue Stick
Ribbon/Twine/String
Mini Clothes Pins (we found ours at Hobby Lobby)
Washable Window Markers (optional)

Instructions:

Since we cut our other set of planets down to fit on our poster board, we decided to keep this set all the same size – in order to see all of the marbled and textured magic! Therefore, we decided to cut off only the white rims of each of the paper plates for our planetary banner. And we also decided to include the sun in this stellar space craft!
Don’t forget that Saturn and Uranus have rings! Cut some rings out of white card stock or construction paper, and glue them to their respective planets.
Run a line of ribbon, twine, or string across a mantel (or similar hanging location – we like to hang banners from our IKEA mirrors in our dining room). We secure the ends of our string to our mirror with mini clothes pins.
Starting from the left-hand side of the string, attach the sun with a mini clothes pin. Now attach the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) until you’ve filled your banner.
Since we hung our planetary banner from the mirrors in our dining room, we decided to label each planet (and the sun) with a black washable window marker!

These Plate Smoosh Planets are out of this world! Who knew that painting between two paper plates could be so incredibly magical? This stellar painting activity is also highly addicting! Once you get started, you won’t ever want to stop. 🙂 You’ll want to keep testing new color combinations, as well as different ways to squish and slide the paint between the plates. It’s seriously so much fun! And you don’t even have to make planets. You can do plate smoosh painting without having a particular end-result in mind – it’s the perfect process art activity!