Paint Creators recreation with students from Vestal School during week 4A.

By the way, the paint made on Paint Creators is a variation of egg tempera. One of my mentors is a woman named Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, and every once in a while, she would teach workshops on making your own egg tempera paint just like artists have for hundreds of years.

Essentially, paint is made of two main things: pigment (the color) and a binder (what holds the color). Egg yolk is a great binder because: Have you ever eaten a fried egg, and you spill some yolk on the plate, and then of course you let it sit on the plate for a couple of days, because of whatever? Like maybe you really had to go get a haircut. Or your brother was bothering you so much you forgot! That’s right, once that egg yolk dries, it’s REALLY HARD to get off of your plate - or anything else for that matter.

So ANYWAY. There’s this totally radical way to make paint. You crack an egg, and pour the white and yolk into your hand. Pass it back and forth from one hand to the next until the white falls away into the compost bucket that (obviously) you are doing this whole task over. THEN, believe it or not, you can actually pick this yolk up by the membrane with your thumb and index fingers. THEN, holding it over a bowl, you can poke it with a poker and all the yolk will fall into the bowl. Wash your hands (if you want).

Because we don’t have an art supply store here at Howard, we like to do what we can with the stuff that we have. I get food coloring from the kitchen to supply our pigment, and it works out pretty well. Students get to mix red, yellow, and blue food coloring with a tiny bit of water and some egg yolk to create their own paints. Pica came to visit this Paint Creators and we found out that using corn starch in the blue paint instead of a bunch of (yellowish) yolk will help make a stronger blue paint.

Maybe today we will make more paint! We will see what today’s recreation brings.

Meta:

• #paint creators
• #egg tempera