How to Color Easter Eggs with Beautiful Watercolors

Our family has a few special holiday traditions, and one of them is coloring Easter eggs together! This year, I thought it would be fun to try a variety of different ways to color the eggs rather than just dyeing them with a kit like we usually do. One of our favorite coloring experiences so far has been painting blown eggs with watercolors! Since I thought they turned out so pretty, I wanted to share how to color Easter eggs with glitter watercolor paints.

Our kids absolutely love painting, so when I heard that we could use watercolor paints on Easter eggs, I knew we had to try it. I wanted to be able to display the eggs since I figured they'd turn out pretty, so we decided to blow the eggs out before painting them. This is the first time I've blown out eggs, and there was a bit of a learning curve!

Blowing Out Eggs

If you've never heard of egg blowing, basically the general idea is this: You poke a small hole on each end of the egg, shake it up to make the yolk separate, and then blow through one hole so the insides of the egg come out. Once you've blown out the egg, you can decorate it and hang it on an Easter tree or display it how you see fit. Plus, you can use the eggs to make a giant omelet instead of wasting them!

You can purchase actual egg blowing kits, but we happened to have a pointy tool from pumpkin carving that worked just fine. Between the kids wanting to help and me and my husband trying to figure out a good technique to get the hole started, we ended up breaking eight of our eighteen eggs-OOPS! We found the best way to get the hole started was to lightly tap the same spot until it broke through, and then gently push around to make the hole a bit larger.

You can use your mouth to blow the egg innards out, but I had an old nasal aspirator that we could use and then toss after. It worked fairly well, aside from the couple times I tried to give it too much pressure and it cracked the egg shell. After that happened a couple times, I decided to shake the eggs vigorously to break up the yolk before blowing.

Once all your eggs are blown, it's time for the fun! I mixed a Tablespoon of white vinegar with about a ½ cup of water and rolled the egg in it before I started painting with watercolors. I don't know the science behind it but vinegar is supposed to help bind color to egg shells.

How to Color Easter Eggs with Watercolors

We bought glitter watercolors on sale at Target for $1.50 (score!) but you can grab some gorgeous colors here if you prefer to shop online. As soon as I started to paint, I fell in love with how the watercolors looked on the eggs. Figuring out the water to paint ratio was a little tough at first, because if you have too much paint the watercolors won't spread, but if you add too much water they just run all over the egg. If I put a color on and wanted it to spread more, I just dabbed a droplet of water on the egg and that spread the color out fairly well.

To hang the eggs on our tree, I had to figure out a way to get green jute through the egg. After a few failed attempts at just jamming it through the tiny holes, I flattened a bobby pin and taped the end of the jute to it. Then I pushed it through the egg, made a loop, and passed it back through. I secured the end by tying a knot below a bead, and I think they came out really well! We did end up running out of jute for the last couple eggs, so I had to use some black cord I had on hand.

I bought this cute Easter tree for $5 from the Target dollar section, but I think I may upgrade to this one for next year because it's just so pretty! I'm so happy with how all of the watercolor eggs turned out. Learning to play with the watercolors was interesting, and I don't know that I could paint anything specific if I actually wanted to, but it was fun to mix and match with colors and patterns and just let the paint do its thing. Our four year old helped me paint the eggs and she was SO proud of our finished product!

The glitter watercolors we used were very vibrant compared to other watercolors we've bought in the past. The glitter doesn't photograph very well but that's what all the little black specks are on the eggs!

This rainbow egg was one of my favorites, and I think it would be fun to have a whole tree full of rainbow eggs! The colors stayed fairly separate as long as we didn't add too much water.

It was interesting to see how some of the eggs' natural texture came through when we painted. If you're looking for a project that's a little easier for young kids, you could also skip blowing the eggs and just hard boil them first, then let the kids paint them. For us, this painting experience was less messy than when we dye the eggs using the tablets from the store!

It's hard to actually capture how beautiful these turned out, because I don't think pictures do them justice. Check out these step-by-step instructions if you want to make your own blown watercolor eggs!

How to Color Easter Eggs with Watercolors

Things you'll need:

Eggs
Watercolors (we used glitter watercolors)
Small Paintbrush
Nasal Aspirator
1 TBSP White Vinegar
A tool to make a small hole (a large nail works well)
Jute cord
Beads

Instructions:

1. Shake the eggs to scramble the yolk
2. Poke a small hole in each end of an egg
3. Use a nasal aspirator (or your own lungs!) to blow into one end of the egg so the white and yolk exit through the other hole (and make sure to have a bowl underneath for this step!)
4. Mix ½ cup of water and 1 Tbsp white vinegar in a small bowl
5. Roll an egg in the water/vinegar mixture
6. Dip your paintbrush in water and then into the watercolor paint of your choice (make sure to rinse brush between each color)
7. Paint away!

As you can see, she's pretty proud of our little tree full of eggs, and I am too! I think they turned out beautiful and this is a new coloring tradition that we will continue after this year!

Have you tried painting Easter eggs before?
How was your experience?