There are an abundance of home-made paint recipes on Pinterest and since our store-bought water colours have been destroyed due to a little over zealous water adding and then subsequent colour mixing I decided to give one of these recipes a go.
The one I chose comes from All Parenting. It seemed easy enough and they had very pretty pictures, which was what drew me to that particular one.
What You’ll Need
- 1 cup of baking soda
- 3/4 cup of white vinegar
- 2 tbsp of corn syrup (this is not available in Australia so I used glucose syrup, which is made from corn so I guess it is similar)
- 1 cup of corn flour
- food colours
- a jug with a spout
- ice-cube tray
How to make it
- Put the baking soda in the jug
- Add the vinegar slowly as it will bubble and you don’t want it to overflow
- Wait until the bubbling stops and mix well
- Add the corn syrup
- Add the corn flour and mix well
It is quite thick and gooey!
Carefully pour it into the ice-cube tray, don’t over fill it or your colours will mix together.
I used a toothpick to scoop up a little bit of colour and mix into each cube, some of my cubes were too full and they overflowed into the cube next to it.
They need to sit over night or maybe as long as a few days before they are able to be used.
After sitting overnight they had firmed up and were the consistency of firm jelly, not quite as wobbly as jelly but they are not chalky like store-bought water colours can be, which is sort of what I was expecting. They also had a thick layer on top that had not set so I used some absorbent paper towel to soak this up. Then it was time to try them out. I also think they must expand a bit as they set because some of our colours had migrated to the cube next door.
You can see here the colour migration, but this was almost completely fixed when I blotted the top layer
I must say I wasn’t really expecting much but I have to tell you my expectation were far exceeded!
These paints are wonderful! We just dipped our brushes in some water dabbed them on the paint and away we went creating fabulous stories! (that is how Rooster likes to paint, we I make a series of pictures that tell a story) Today he told a story about an alien that was walking past a tree, then he went to a party and danced and ate party food, then went to the playground with his new friends! 
Any way getting back to the paint, the colours were vibrant and they behaved exactly how water colours should. I love, love, love them and will never go back to store-bought paints again.
They were easy to make and Rooster had fun helping to make them, he especially like adding the vinegar to the baking soda. The paints themselves were easy to use and you can make your own custom colours and another big plus, you know exactly what has gone into them and can be assured that they are 100% non-toxic! so what are you waiting for go and make your own!
Misadventures in craft 
Great idea!!