Making our own Paints?

The yellow and red paints.

It's Sunday. August 14, 2011. Outside it's blazing hot, but we're inside. What are we doing?

HOW IT ALL STARTED

 It all started on the way back home from art class. I asked, "How do you make paint?"
 Mummy replied, "I don't know."
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Plan for the upcoming year
by Mummy

9. How do you get colors, dye, and chemicals? Permanent/temp., shades/ paint v light?
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Note by Shreyes: We can make our own paint!

And so we did. 

It was Monday, and I was looking forward to a "Bird Banding" Activity by the Audubon Society (John James Audubon was an artist who went out west and drew pictures of birds, some of which are extinct today.) on Saturday. After that activity, I planned to make our own paint, but my timing was wrong: it would be 12:30 - lunchtime - by the time we got home. Anyway, Daddy and I went to the Bird Banding activity. I didn't like it, and I also didn't like the fact that after lunch, we were going for tennis practice until 7:00.
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The next day was the perfect time for painting.
Daddy asked me, "What's the recipe?"
I wrote down the recipe on the easel.


RED -> TOMATO PUREE, STRAWBERRY PUREE
ORANGE -> ORANGE PUREE, BANANA
YELLOW -> APPLES, BANANA
GREEN -> LEAVES, GRASS
BLUE ->
PURPLE ->
BROWN -> SOIL
BLACK ->
WHITE -> MILK, BANANA


And we started to make the paint.

The red paint.

RED
For red, I suggested tomato puree, and I only added on the strawberry puree because Sugi suggested it.  

I went to look for tomatoes in the fridge, but unluckily, we were all out of vegetables. However, I saw a packet of strawberries. They were rotting, but still good enough for paint. While I put them in the grinder, Mummy went to find paintbrushes. 
When Mummy came back with the brushes, the paint was ready. I tested it out on a paper, and it was pink!


Daddy suggested to try putting in some kumkuma (saffron powder). On Friday, we did the Vara Lakshmi Pooja and had some kumkuma left over. I put half of the cup in and the paint became redder, but not fully red. I tilted the kumkuma cup, but, since the kumkuma cup was attached to the pasupu (turmeric) cup, the turmeric tilted over. The bowl had orange paint in it.

The yellow paint.

Fortunately, some strawberry puree was still in the blender. I took it out, put it in a cup, and added kumkuma by spoon. Finally, it was red.


YELLOW

Because pasupu is yellow, I decided to try and make yellow paint with it. But all the pasupu was dwarfed by a tiny bit of water, and the paint became a liquid. 
There were no bananas in the house, and the insides of apples and pears (the only fruits we had) are white.

Daddy suggested putting in egg yolks. I fetched an egg from the fridge and broke the shell with a spoon and mixed the yolk with the turmeric water. The yellow paint was ready.

ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE

Alan Alexander Milne? After the subtitles "How it all Started", "Red", and "Yellow", why would I put the name of a random person as a subtitle? Because Alan A. Milne was no random person. He was the author of all the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

 For green, my recipe was "LEAVES, GRASS." So Sugi and I went out to chip some leaves. When we came back with a bowl full of leaves, Mummy told us that the leaves might be poisonous and she didn't want the poison to get mixed with the dosa (crispy crepe) batter.
All the green vegetables were over. There was no methi (fenugreek) or coriander/cilantro. I never got around to making green paint.


Even less successful was our quest to make black paint. I reasoned that since black = red + yellow + blue, to make black you need to make blue. To make blue, I could only think of morning-glories and blueberries. We had no blueberries in the fridge, and the morning-glories, once bright blue, had faded to a dull lilac. I never made black or blue paint.
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Without blue, black, green, brown, or white paints I couldn't make any other paints. So I tried painting something with the paints I had already made.

What's red, orange, and/or yellow? Well, that's easy: Winnie-the-Pooh!
And Tigger too, of course.

I took a pen and went out to the hall. Why? Because there was a box with pictures of (the Disney) Winnie-the-Pooh on it in the hall. I drew two drawings of Pooh and Tigger and took them to the kitchen to be painted. I painted them with the orange, red, and yellow paints. Mummy and Daddy both said it was beautiful.