Here are the results of the experiments so far....
I tried mixing yellow mustard powder and chili powder into small batches of the clay but neither produced any color. They do cause the clay to dry out very quickly though so i kept having to add water to it.
I tried various brews of tea painted onto the dry clay. The darker red the brewed tea is the more color it produces on the clay - but it makes for a very, very pale bluish-purple. Repeated coats can make it a bit darker. The lighter red colored teas did not produce any color.
Wet coffee grounds applied on top of the dried clay and allowed to dry there makes the clay brown (surprise
). Again it is a pale brown but gets some nice variation. It can be a pain to get the dried grounds out of any small nooks but worth it in the end.
Food coloring was my next experiment. Mixing it into the clay produces color, but you need quite a bit to get a deep color. The cool part is that, as the clay dries, the color starts to move to the edges. You cannot place two different colored pieces in contact with one another as they dry though. I created a flower using red dye on the petals and yellow for the center, the red leached into the yellow making it dark orange. The colors are, again, rather pale compared to paint.....unless you paint the food coloring directly onto the dried clay. Then the colors are very bright but since they soak into the clay it doesn't look like paint. If mixing the food coloring into the wet clay, it does cause it to dry out while working with it so you'll need to add water (even though I was using liquid food coloring). Of course that could be caused by the amount of time I had to kneed the clay to mix the color into it all the way.
I've also tried a variety of colored India inks, but painted onto the dried clay. They look great with the exception of my brown ink - it becomes purple on the clay.
Just for the hell of it I also used Sharpie markers on the dried clay. The silver ones do produce a metallic look as it more or less dries on top of the clay. The others sink in to produce bright colors so I suppose if you wanted to do some quicky fine detail work with they would be OK but I'm not sure they really look all that great.
I did think about getting some pigments that are made for paper work but I'm trying to save a bit of money for Art-o-Matic. I've sold some pieces recently so I may need to produce to some more work for the show, especially if I sell anything at three shows I have before then. I can't do any more experimenting until next week as my husband completely freaks out when I do weird things in the house. Of course when he's not here the mouse is free to play
