Food Coloring Is an Alternative to Watercolor Paint
If you run out of your favorite color of watercolor paint, raid the pantry for some food coloring.
My Experiment With Food Coloring
I enjoy playing around with mixed media just to see what happens. Yesterday, I must have been craving some frosting or maybe a piece of cake. Every time I opened the pantry, the food coloring caught my eye.
I’ve thought about painting with food coloring before but shelved it as a wacky idea. I’m not going to lie I was worried about staining my work surface. That’s probably the weakest excuse in my book because my creative surface looks like a mosaic of spilled colors.
I was just putting it off. So, finally, I thought I’d give it a try. I really like how easy it was to work with and how vibrant the colors are.
I added one drop to my paint pallet and some water. The more water you add the lighter the color will dry on the paper. It’s very runny since the ‘paint’ has the same consistency as water and drips easily.
It’s not suitable for fine art but it’s great as an abstract art painting medium.
Start Small
I have a 9 x 12-inch watercolor paper pad and divided it into eight 3 x 4.5-inch mini canvases.
After coloring all 8 areas, I still had paint left to complete a larger 9 x 12-inch full painting and could possibly have done a second large painting.
So, it’s not only a good paint for watercolor paper but also dirt cheap. I only used one drop of food coloring color per color. You can mix colors too. The blue and yellow made a wonderful bright green. While the green directly from the bottle was darker.
Let It Dry and Add Layers
Once the paint had dried on my watercolor paper, I used gel pens in black and gold and a white paint pen to doodle on the colorful canvas.
Are There Limitations?
Fine artwork will be difficult because the paint is so runny — like water.
The only other thing is that there is no white pigment to make pastels.
I don’t mind either of these. I wonder if I added actual white watercolor paint.
Hmm? Maybe next time.
