Hydro Dipped Easter Eggs

This week, I felt like I’d been a bad mom lately and so decided to spend time with my girls coloring Easter eggs. We started the good-old way with baking soda, food coloring, and vinegar. But after poking and draining about six eggs to color the shells, I’d kind of had enough of that and tried to think of a way to decorate the bagful of plastic eggs we had lying around.

I’ve wanted to hydro-dip…something (anything really) for a while, and it seemed like painting Easter eggs this way might be kinda cool. So, after a quick trip to Michael’s yesterday, we had all the spray paint colors we could think of and were ready to go.

Is this a particularly kid-friendly art project? Not really. LOL. But my girls were surprisingly helpful and did a great job – the key to my success lies entirely in the plastic gloves I made them wear.

Step 1: Spray on a base layer. In order for hydro dipping to really work, I’m told you need a base layer of paint for the spray paint to stick to. So, I took my bag of plastic eggs and popped them apart so they’d sit flat. Then I took a plain white spray paint and sprayed all over the eggs to get a good coat on. I went with white because I figured that would help them look the most “realistic” as eggs when finished.

Supplies:

(As an advertising affiliate and Amazon Associate, I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. But it doesn’t cost you anything extra and helps me keep up my site!)

Plastic easter eggs
Spray paints
Gloves
Cup or other container

Step 2: Prep for painting. Once the base coat was dry (I gave mine about 4 hours), I snapped all the eggs back together and took them in a basket out to my deck. This seemed like the best place to do this at the time simply because I wanted good ventilation while working with the girls.

It’s important to have everything ready to go because the paint will dry pretty quickly in the water, so you want your eggs right there when you start. I made sure to shake up all of my spray paint cans really well too. Because I wanted to dry the eggs inside (it was a windy day), I lay a silicone baking sheet and a few paper towels on the kitchen counter to be ready. And perhaps most importantly, we made sure we had gloves in place.

Step 3: Hydro dip! I used a solo cup because I figured the eggs didn’t need a lot of room to dunk them, but you could use a spare Tupperware container or an old whipped cream container or something else entirely. Really, it just has to be a container that’s deep enough to submerge the egg.

I filled my cup a little over 3/4 full of water, then took it to the deck. My girls stood ready with an egg each, and then I began spraying the paint into the cup. I made sure to spray in the center of the cup each time, and I held the can about 6 inches above the cup as I sprayed so it didn’t shoot everywhere. It only took little bursts at a time to get enough paint into the cup to cover the surface.

We found that we really liked the metallic spray paints, and the blue and purple covered the surface really well. I alternated my combinations of colors, and really there was no bad way to go.

Each time, when I had enough paint to cover the surface, the girls would slowly lower a plastic egg down through the paint. Sometimes we’d have to turn the egg over and do the other side again, but this was no problem because the paint on the egg adheres REALLY fast, so it doesn’t drip or anything. For a few eggs, we also found that setting them to float on the surface and then just rolling them also pulled the paint to cover the eggs, though this took a little longer.

We did about 30 eggs in 45 minutes, so it went pretty quickly. I never had to refill the water, and I never bothered cleaning the cup because the paint you don’t use moves to the edges anyway. The girls had a lot of fun dunking the eggs, shaking off the water, and then running them inside to sit and dry. Our gloves got messy, and I was worried about the paint pulling off the eggs as we set them down, but that turned out to not be an issue because of how fast the paint sets.

I will say that my eggs had little holes at the tops and bottoms, so that helped to drain any water that got inside. Once they were all on the paper towel to dry, I did give them a few hours before using them to decorate.