Water Color Paints {homemade}

This conference weekend as a craft time with the kiddos, we made homemade water color paints. Painting with water colors is a fun past time the kids and I share together.

I decided to make these paints because it's so darn cheap and I had everything to make it in my pantry!

BUT I have some good news and some selfish news...

The Good: The paints turned out GREAT!!! Better than drugstore purchased paints.

The Selfish: I wouldn't let the kids use them! I DID promise the kids I'd make more for them, but for now, I was having too much fun and decided to be selfish with my concoction of paints. After taking the time to make 24 BEAUTIFUL colors, all I could see in my head was them mixing the colors into a goopy grey/brown mess and my selfishness took over. They got to use their regular crayola paints and I felt horrible, so I gave them a sucker. No lie.

So this is how easy it is:

• 4 tbsp baking soda
• 2 tbsp white vinegar
• 1/2 tsp light corn syrup (I think this known as Kayro syrup in some parts).
• 2 tbsp corn starch (known as corn flour in the UK)
• Food colouring (liquid or gels)
• container to keep your paints in –mini muffin tin, ice-cube tray, small plastic cups, plastic egg carton etc.
• toothpicks 

Mix the ingredients together (except food color) in a small round bowl so you can make sure to scrape and whip/mix it really well! I'd mix the soda and vinegar together first and let it settle for about 15 seconds and then mix the rest in.
Pour into containers. This filled half of my mini ice cube tray. The cornstarch can make it hard to mix in the food color after it has set for a long while so I made 12 colors whipped up a second batch for the other half and then continued making the rest of my color blends.

I had regular food color drops as well as NEON food color drops. I put about 2-3 drops of food color in each one, but there were a couple that I even did 6, so you can go with it how ever you want! I had fun mixing 24 colors!

Look how VIBRANT they are!!

Zebra's have the saddest eyes. Even neon rainbow zebras look sad.

I did have to double paint the black because it was a more charcoal color when it dried. And my RED turned out to be hot pink when dried, which is a good day for me I guess.

I had a lot of fun and it hardly faded when dry. When it IS dry it's slightly chalky. For kids it perfect, and for me it's perfect because I'm not a professional. But if you rubbed your finger across it, you would have a chalky residue on your finger. The color doesn't come off, trust me I tried to rub it off just in case and it didn't fade with me rubbing it vigorously, but if it's a picture you want to save for EVER. Scan it and print it. because you don't want chalky residue in your file cabinet.

I'll be painting rainbows for the next few days.
-Enjoy