Color experimenting

 I am working on putting together workshops for kids to learn and make some things out of wood.  My struggle has been the painting.  Young kids really like painting and coloring there stuff so I need to come up with a solution.  

Here are the things I have thought about:

• 
  Markers - may not be very messy but also not very affordable.  Wood and markers also don't go together well because wood is more abrasive than paper and will wear down the tips quickly.  On the positive side they do not make a mess and they will clean up with water.  They also dry fast.
• Acrylic paint - It is a lot more messy, stains clothes, and takes forever to dry because kids layer it on pretty thick.  It is also uses more stuff because brushes need to be cleaned and rinsed with water.  On the plus side it is cheap and one bottle can be used multiple times.
• Paint pens - are not affordable and have chemicals that I don't want kids using.
• Food dyes - are thin and dry quickly.  They are too liquid for me to have kids use.  
• Water color pallets - They are about a $1 a piece on amazon so they are affordable if they are reusable.  Mixing colors and contamination is very likely when kids use them

I tried making my own.  I tried two things: drying out acrylic paint and drying out food coloring.  These were dried on parchment paper because that is what I had.  I put aluminum foil under the food dies because I was not sure if it would bleed through.  It did not. Here are some of the key observations that I made.

 Acrylic paint comes in many colors and food dyes typically come in four so I did have to make some of my own colors and I did not have black or white.

• The yellow dye looks a lot like orange
• The acrylic paint dried in about 24 hours.  The dyes did not seen to dry after 72 hours
• The dyes stain my hands while the paint washed of with soap, water and a little scrubbing.
• The acrylic paint rehydrated with some water and a paint brush.  it did stake some work and the colors were translucent and not opaque.

The next step is to see how the parchment paper holds up to kids and painting.  The other nice thing that was nice with the paint was the viscosity.  I could put the paint down and put another piece of parchment on top.  Pat it down a little bit and peel the two sheets apart.  I now had two painting papers.