Form and sculpt our favorite recipe for simple salt dough into beautifully textured handmade salt dough sea stars! This a lovely invitation for kids to observe and recreate these curious and captivating marine invertebrates.
Spend enough time on this site, and you’ll quickly realize I love nothing more than a quality animal-inspired art project.
Use the links below to jump straight to this article’s specific topic of interest…
Beyond the obvious visual joy in our collective critter-dom, I have two specific purposes for building so many projects around our fabulous shared menagerie of wildlife…
1.) Using art materials to recreate animals requires a bit of observation, which can lead to a new level of interest in understanding an animal’s anatomy, life cycle, or purpose within our larger environment.
2.) Recreating specific qualities of an animal can help kids (or adults!) discover new ways to work with art materials and invite exploration or curiosity that might be hard to come by without the prompt.
Watch the video tutorial below for many techniques to help you form ideas for creating shapes and adding texture to your salt dough starfish…
Music: Bubble Tea by Mona Wonderlick Support the artist here
But here’s another thing I love about starfish specifically as an art (especially sculptural art!) subject… the beauty is in the IMPERFECTION. Like other sea life (or animals…or humans!) the unpolished, distinctive details are the qualities that will give your starfish character, interest, and a TRUE sense of realism.
Pair this activity with our air-dry clay nudibranchs project or one of over 40 ocean-inspired art & craft favorites for a full day of marine life art-making.
To make your own DIY salt dough sea stars you can use:
Note: We prefer to shop locally or use what we have at home, but this list contains Woodpeckers Crafts, Etsy, Blick Art Materials, Bookshop.org and/or Amazon affiliate links for reference. As affiliates (and Amazon Associates), we make a small commission on qualifying purchases.*
SALT DOUGH INGREDIENTS:
Makes roughly 7-10 starfish
- 2 cups of flour
- 1 cup of salt
- 1 cup of water
BASIC SUPPLIES:
- A baking sheet (with optional parchment paper)
- A plastic knife, plastic fork, toothpick, q-tip, and/or sharpened pencil
OPTIONAL SUPPLIES:
- Watercolors, acrylic or tempera paints, and a paintbrush or sponge
- Mod Podge or similar
- A set of sea star templates, a starfish cookie cutter, or dried starfish for reference (like these, these, or these)
- Suction cups (like these)
- Yarn or twine
How to Make Salt Dough Sea Stars – DIY Instructions
Our step-by-step guide will show you how to create beautiful, beachy salt dough starfish using simple ingredients and easy craft techniques.
Mix the salt dough.
Combine flour, salt, and water in a large bowl and mix with a spoon or knead together with your hands until smooth.
Kids love participating in this step, and it’s an excellent way to flex those fine motor skills and warm up their hands for sculpting!
Form the salt dough into starfish.
Time to PLAY with the sea star form. In the tutorial video, I demonstrate four different techniques you can explore to mold your starfish, but there are no rules when it comes to salt dough sculpting!
The exciting part of this process is trying different methods, discovering the unique qualities of salt dough, and figuring out your favorite working style.
Tip: It might be helpful to cut out a basic starfish shape; begin by using a star-shaped cookie cutter or a dried starfish for reference.
Add texture to your starfish.
This step really takes your starfish from a star-shaped blob of dough to “WOW – was that…a real starfish…?”
You can use the tip of a pencil, q-tip, toothpick, etc to add texture to your sea stars. Experiment with different tools and observe the distinctive marks they make in the dough.
Add details to your starfish (optional).
Once the texturing is finished, you can add details like tube feet (those little suction cup-like structures) extra arms, spines, or other cool starfish bits.
Bake or let your starfish air dry.
Bake at 225 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. Our larger, thicker starfish were baked for an hour but needed another 20 to 30 minutes to cool down and dry out completely.
You can also let your salt dough sea stars air dry instead. Leave your starfish in a dry spot for at least 24 hours. Let cool for 30 minutes before handling.
Paint your starfish (optional).
I like the natural look of the salt dough for our sea stars, but the real starfish of the sea come in a rainbow of fantastic colors! You can use watercolors, acrylic, or tempera paint. This is also a great excuse to experiment with watercolor washes, sponge painting, or other ways to apply and mix your colors.
Once baked, the salt actually gives these sea stars a lovely sparkle, as if they were just plucked straight from the ocean!
Variations on our Salt Dough Starfish
There are endless ways to alter this fun process for younger kids, occasions when you have less prep time, or for less permanent results…
- Add suction cups for starfish window clingers! As we did for our climbing paper tree frogs, you can make your sea stars stick to the windows using suction cups (just like the real deal). Use a hot glue gun to affix a suction cup to the back of your starfish, let it dry thoroughly, and pop it on a window.
- String your homemade starfish into a garland. To do this, you can either hot glue hangers to the back of your starfish or plan it into the process. Before baking, use a toothpick or straw to create a small hole in the top of your starfish, then string a set together with yarn or twine for an instant ocean party!
- Make salt dough sea star ornaments. Using the same idea above, plan ahead and use a toothpick or straw to make a small hole in the top of your starfish. Thread with ribbon or twine and tie into a loop for hanging on the tree.
- Build playdough sea stars. Instead of using clay and adding paint, grab a few colors of play dough, and similar additional supplies, and make some impermanent sea stars. Homemade playdough is the perfect color for natural-looking stars, but starfish come in bold, bright colors too, so anything will look spectacular!
Salt Dough Texture-Making Tools
I only demonstrated a couple of tools I found around the house to give these starfish some good handmade textures, but there are loads of household objects you can experiment with! To get you started, here are a few other texture-makers to try…
- A comb
- Legos
- Buttons
- Straws
- Tweezers
- Nuts, bolts, and washers
- Pinecones
- Dry pasta
- A broken stick
- An old sponge
For more beachy projects and activities, skate by our summer swim-themed playdough invitation, download a free printable beach scavenger hunt, or fire up our Spotify “By the Sea” playlist – with kid-friendly + adult-approved tunes for easy seaside listening or summer crafting.
*A note about affiliate links: We strive to use simple, earth-friendly supplies that can be purchased locally whenever we can, but sometimes we find the best universally available options, a rare eco-friendly find, or a niche product only available on Blick Art Materials, Amazon, Etsy, or Woodpeckers Crafts. When included in our supply list, these products are affiliate links, and if you click through to make a purchase we receive a small commission that helps us re-order these supplies!
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I love seeing all the ways people make these ideas their own! If you're sharing the results of one of our projects, mention or tag me with @barleyandbirch, or share it in the comments of one of our Pinterest project pins.
