Make your very own paints from plants, berries, and powders! - Fun Kids - the UK's children's radio station (2024)

FAQs

How do you make paint with plants? ›

To make the paints, put the plant material into a pot*, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Let it boil for 15-20 minutes – the water will start to turn color. - *If you have an electric kettle, put the plant material in a bowl or cup and pour boiling water over. Let sit for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Mash the berries with a mortar and pestle or the back of a spoon. Strain the pulp out using a sieve or colander and pour into a small jar or bowl. Add a generous pinch of salt and a splash of vinegar to preserve the paint and mix well. Berries with a darker flesh will produce richer colors.

How to make your own natural paints: Push berries or other soft fruit through a sieve to extract your pigment, then mix with just a small splash of water! Grind petals, leaves, or other dry items before mixing with a tiny, tiny bit of honey! Powders are the easiest!

MAKING THE DYE

In a small saucepan, mix 2 cups of water with 1 cup of each fruit or veg. Bring to a boil over medium heat and leave to simmer for about one hour. Turn off the heat and allow the water to cool to room temperature. Strain the juice into glass containers.

Combine flour and salt in a small bowl. Add a bit of water and stir until you get a smooth, thin paste (about the same consistency of stirred yogurt). Add food colouring, and mix well. Put painting into microwave for 30 seconds and watch it puff up!

Mix baking soda and vinegar together in a spouted container i.e. 2 cup measuring cup. Add corn syrup and cornstarch, and mix until well dissolved. Your mixture will thicken if you stop stirring so keep it moving as you pour. Add a dab of icing gel or 6 drops of liquid food colour to each compartment of paint.

Dropping lemon juice into semi wet watercolor paints doesn't produce such an immediate reaction. But if left to sit until it's dry the citric acid in the juice will bleach the colors of the watercolor paint producing super interesting shapes.

Old paint shelf life can also vary among different types of paint. In particular, an unopened can of latex or acrylic paint lasts up to 10 years. For unopened paints that are oil-based or alkyd-based, the shelf life could be up to 15 years.

Recipe for Homemade Salt and Flour Paint

Blend 1/2 cup of flour with 1/2 cup of salt. Add 1/2 cup of water… and mix until smooth. Divide it up into three sandwich bags and add a few drops of liquid watercolor or food coloring to each bag.

How do you make baby paint UK? ›

All paints generally have four main ingredients -- pigments, binders, solvents (liquids) and additives. Pigments provide color and hide, while binders work to "bind" the pigment together and create the paint film.

The most basic color combination to create gray is black and white, but there are many other options. For warmer grays, try combining yellow and purple. You can make cooler gray shades with a combination of orange and blue, or try mixing red and green for another dark cool gray.

If you don't have any child safe paint at home, try using fruit juice instead. Take fruit juice (darker juice works best) and freeze it in ice cube trays. As the cubes start to set, add a Popsicle stick as a handle. Once the cubes are completely frozen, let your child “paint”.

Supplies for Homemade Gel Edible Paint:

2 tablespoons sugar. 1/3 cup cornstarch. 2 cups water. Food coloring or liquid watercolors — definitely food coloring if it might end up in a tiny mouth.

Berry juice makes a pretty, translucent paint, similar to watercolor. I love to see little fingerprints and finger swipes of berry juice on these paintings!

Broccoli and cauliflower work well for painting because of their florets. Mushrooms come in a variety of shapes that allow for creativity. Apples, pears, bananas, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, carrots, bell peppers, corn cobs, green beans, oranges, lemons, and limes are other good options.

Whatever you have in the cupboard. In the tutorial, I have used; tea bags, onion skins, ground coffee, blueberries, turmeric, blackberries and paprika. You could also try beetroot, saffron, red cabbage or spinach. You don't need to use a lot of anything, and you don't need to make more than two pigments.

How do you make homemade powder paint? ›

Now that we've got all of our supplies, we found a recipe on Pinterest – they are all pretty much the same: 1 pound cornstarch, 1 ounce of color, 1 cup water. First we dumped the powder into our bowl – do this slowly or you get a big white cloud of powder everywhere.

Start with a ratio of 1 part Gum/Honey to 1 part pigment paste and adjust as necessary. Mix all the ingredients and work them on a glass plate using a paint spatula. Your goal is to obtain a paste with a thick, creamy consistency. Some pigments will incorporate easier than others.

Take the petals off a few flower heads and drop them into a little bowl. Pour boiling water over the petals - just enough water so the petals are covered. Using your wooden lollipop stick or paintbrush, mix the petals in the water. The dye will change colour right away, but will continue to darken for a while longer.

What does the salt do? The salt acts a resist of sorts. The area where the salt touches the paper will be lighter in color. The salt will push the watercolor pigment away and thus the lighter spot will be surrounded by a darker shade.

Why honey? Honey allows for high pigment loads, and an incredibly smooth application. The combination of gum arabic and honey result in a binder that is free from additives and filler, allowing for the purest painting experience possible.

If it's unopened, it's probably still usable.

Unused latex and water-based acrylic paints last up to 10 years, and the shelf life of alkyd and oil-based can be as long as 15 years.

Can you paint with a 1 year old? Finger painting can begin as young as 6 months old! A 1 year old can fingerpaint on paper at the table or in the bathtub.

Freezing temperatures can do permanent damage to the emulsion in paint, causing the paint to become a strange consistency. Paint that has frozen and thawed may become ropey, stringy or clumpy. It may be the consistency of cottage cheese or gritty, like sandy water.

How do you make thick paint for kids? ›

Cornstarch and flour are the magic ingredients that control how thick your finger paints are, so add more if you want.

To make pure black, mix blue, magenta, and yellow in equal parts. You can test this out on your sketch pad; put a dab of the three paints on your pad and mix colors with a paint brush or palette knife until achieving a rich black.

There are various colors which can combine together to make black. Red, yellow, and blue can all combine to create a primary shade of black. Alternatively, you can experiment with shades of red, blue, green, and purple.

Paint consists of binders, pigments and fillers, solvents or water, and the so-called additives. When developing new paint, the raw materials are chosen for the compatibility with the object to be painted. The mixing ratio varies depending on the type of paint.

Additive primaries act as sources of light. The primaries red, green, and blue combine pairwise to produce the additive secondaries cyan, magenta, and yellow. Combining all three primaries (center) produces white.

The easiest and fastest way to go gray is to get your hair buzzed very short. If that's too drastic for you, a pixie cut is the preferred route for many women.

The two colors you can mix to create gold are yellow and brown. You may add more colors to tint the gold, but these are the two primary colors that make gold.

Turmeric, sunflower petals, bay leaves, dandelion flowers, marigolds and celery leaves also work. Green: This is probably the easiest. You can use artichokes, spinach, peppermint leaves, lilacs or just plain grass. Orange: Some common ideas are chili powder, paprika and carrots.

How do you make paint out of flowers and leaves? ›

All you need to do is pour boiling water over petals, stir them to release the colour, then choose if you'd like to alter the pH with an acid or alkali. Then paint! It's that easy.

Coreopsis or dahlia petals bleed well – but any flower type will do. The key is strong colours. The colour doesn't always correspond to the flower. I collected some white petals that I was almost certain would yield some transparent water, but as the swatch will show, it actually came out a fantastic brown/yellow.

Recipe for Homemade Salt and Flour Paint

Blend 1/2 cup of flour with 1/2 cup of salt. Add 1/2 cup of water… and mix until smooth. Divide it up into three sandwich bags and add a few drops of liquid watercolor or food coloring to each bag.