Paint Balloon Archery Inspired Gender Reveal: How We Did It

Happy Friday! Is it just me or has this week flown by?? I’m excited for another weekend at home without any major obligations, and plenty of sunshine and playtime with my favorite tiny human.

Today I wanted to talk about our gender reveal. To refresh your memory, or if you’re new to the blog, I shared our reveal in THIS POST.

Our gender reveal has since been pinned on Pinterest over 29,000 times (<—WHAT!!!!), and has been featured on several “gender reveal roundup” posts around the web. I pinned it just to give other soon-to-be mamas an idea, and never imagined it would be re-pinned so many times and now be one of my all time top posts on Sweet Miles. How fun is that?? (PS there are so many AMAZING gender reveal ideas out there, and one is certainly not better than another! Revealing the gender of your future child is always special no matter what!)

Adam and I found out around 17 weeks that we were having a girl, and we wanted to tell our families and closest friends in a fun way. After scouring Pinterest and brainstorming ideas ourselves, we knew we wanted to do something a little different, and something that would involve both of us. We thought of a great idea, but after our location plans for it fell through, we opted for Plan B. I don’t want to share what that idea was in case we do it for our next child…but it was definitely our first choice!

We decided on a different take on the traditional balloon pop reveal and the paint balloon darts reveal. We thought doing something with Adam’s bow would be more reflective of Adam and I wanted a way to “keep” our reveal. We concluded we would fill a balloon with pink paint, pin it to a canvas, and take a video of Adam shooting the balloon. Then we’d send the video to our friends and family, many of whom we Skyped or Face Time’d with while they watched it so we could see their reactions. So to get started, we headed to Hobby Lobby to buy our supplies!

For our reveal supplies we used:

-1 16X20 blank canvas (or maybe bigger, I can’t remember the exact dimensions)

-1 2 oz tube of pink, blue, and grey acrylic paint

-Paint brushes

-1 normal sized black balloon (found in a pack of black balloons in the party/birthday aisle at Hobby Lobby)

To decorate the canvas, I spent all of ten minutes painting “He or She?” at the top of my canvas. Ok, the actual painting took maybe two seconds, but I practiced and practiced on old newspaper because I have the worst paint handwriting ever and didn’t want to mess this up! Anyone else’s hands shake before they try to paint something important?? I’m no Monet, that’s for sure.

I let the canvas dry overnight, and we planned to do our big video the next day after work.

Now for the actual process.

I’ve had several people ask how we filled the balloon with paint. To do this took some steady hands, but it really wasn’t that difficult. We just stretched open the opening of the balloon and pulled it over the paint spout as best we could, then squeezed maybe half of the 2 oz tube of paint into the balloon. Maybe not even half, maybe like a fourth. It took one of us holding the balloon open and the other squeezing the paint.

Then we blew up the balloon just like you normally would, tied it off, and shook it up so that paint would coat all over the inside of the balloon and *hopefully* splatter somewhat evenly.

To attach the balloon to the canvas, we just used a push pin/thumb tack and hung it in the middle of the canvas. We also propped up the canvas against a big stump in our backyard, and laid a tarp down under everything so paint wouldn’t get all over our yard.

Then it was time to shoot it!

I stood off to the side with my camera and Adam stood up on our back deck with his bow and arrow, maybe 20 yards away?? As luck would have it, it started raining seconds before we headed out to set everything up, but we were so excited to finally tell everyone what we were having that we didn’t care and went ahead and just did it really fast.

Side note – our backyard looked like a jungle of weeds, and our back deck was a hot mess from cleaning our chair cushions off so everything was just scattered all over the place. Whoops!

As soon as I said go, Adam fired away, and the rest is history. Easy peasy!

Thankfully, everything went perfectly and the paint splattered just as I had envisioned it, and we now have a fun canvas in Adeline’s room as a keepsake. I’ll never ever forget seeing the reactions of our loved ones, and being able to share in their excitement and joy for a new niece or granddaughter. It was definitely worth it to put a little extra time into the way we told them!

I think that about covers it, if you have anymore questions, let me know!

What did you do for a gender reveal? Did you do a gender reveal at all? There are so many amazingly cute ideas out there, I’d love to hear your own idea!