Okay so I am a little bit addicted to YouTube so as normal I was on there and I came across this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKlhnqhxos0 that tells you how to make your own watercolors.
Although that video tells you everything you really need to know I decided that I would tell you guys also and give you some little tips and tricks.
What you will need:
1 cup of baking soda
3/4 cup of vinegar
1 cup of cornstarch
Food coloring
An ice cube tray or an egg carton or some little cups of containers to store the watercolors in
A decent sized bowl to mix everything
A spoon or another sturdy stirring device.
Some things before you get started:
1. If you are using an egg carton like I did make sure there are no holes in the bottom of the egg carton. If there are holes I would recommend taping them and then putting paper towel underneath. I had some tiny holes so when I poured my watercolor mixture in it started to leak out.
2. Be very careful with food coloring. It will stain things very easily.
3. You don't have to do those exact measurements if you don't want to. You could make more or less but these are pretty standard. Whatever you use it will be a 4:3:4 ratio. Four parts of baking soda three parts of vinegar and four parts cornstarch. But I will refer to the basic measurements in this post.
The first thing you will do is put in the cup of baking soda...
Now it is time to add your vinegar. It will fizz when you put it in but it shouldn't be that bad. To prevent it from overfizzing and for ease of measuring I would put in your 3/4 cup 1/4 cup at a time.
This is the mixture after 1/4 cup of vinegar.
After 2/4...
This is the potential fizzing...
And after all 3/4 cup of vinegar. It'll be a nice liquidly mixture.
You will then add your cup of cornstarch. Cornstarch can clog drains so beware not to put this down your drain.
Stir it up. Cornstarch mixed with any liquid feels really weird. It'll look liquidy but when you stir it it will be more solid and it will also be liquidy.
Now it is time to fill you tray or your storage containers with your mixture. I made my mistake of filling them to high so it was hard to mix in the food coloring.
Then you will add your food coloring. Making your own watercolors is really nice because you can make whatever colors you want and you get a lot of watercolors for relatively cheap. Say you are doing a project with lots of reds then you can make a lot of red water colors or if you don't like pink then you don't have to make pink watercolors. The more food coloring you add the more liquidly it will become which is fine.
These are watercolors right after I made them.I fyou look it looks like some of the watercolors are tie-died because I lifted my tray up with the lid on to tape some holes on the bottom and the liquid watercolor at the top totally spilled all to one side creating the tie-die effect. Hopefully once I use them the colors I made will be underneath since i spent a lot of time making the perfect colors.
Now because you added food coloring which is a liquid then watercolors will liquidy for a while. To use them you don't have to use water. But after awhile they will dry up and you'll need to use water.
I had some extra watercolor mixture so I put it in this cup for white watercolor. It will show up white when you paint.
As for when you paint and it dries....
Well it turns out really cool and not like normal watercolor. Your surface/paper will be really soft because you coated it with colored cornstarch. I think this is really cool and the colors I used turned out kind of pastelish which was really pretty. The downside is that the watercolor started to chip off because it wasn't soaked in the paper it was sitting on top. I still really like them though. I haven't used them when they are dry but I will do an update when I do.
I hoped this helped and I'd love to see what you did with this. Make it you own.
