One Inch World

Art Friday, the slightly late edition. This is a good one though, although it’s more work to set up than many. But, it’s physics! It’s paint! It’s fun!

Woo pendulum painting! I saw this idea in Disney Family Fun Magazine, and also in Teacher Tom’s blog. Disney had you hang the pendulum from a tree, Teacher Tom had built a pvc table frame.

I didn’t have paper big enough for a tree-hung-pendulum, and if I had used one I know a few young ladies that would have swung the pendulum over their heads spraying paint all over the visible scene. I also didn’t have enough PVC to build a dedicated frame, but I did have several 5′ lengths that I’d just bought for our air rocket project. (Yes, there will be pictures of that next Friday.)

So I used my mad lashing skills to make a tripod. We should all get to use our mad lashing skills more often, I am pretty sure.

Our pendulum we made out of an 8oz paint bottle with a glue bottle type nozzle. My original thinking was that we would be able to control the flow, but it only barely worked full open. It did make it easy to close it to fill with paint though.

For the paint I just used tempera paint cut 50/50 with water. I kept adding water until it would freely drain through the glue bottle cap. Sometimes I didn’t add enough and it would make a drippy spotty line, but that’s fun too.

We all had fun! There was ‘proper’ painting by letting the pendulum swing, and also quite a lot of just holding the string and wagging the pendulum around, in addition to some ‘moving the paper’ techniques employed by our youngest artist.

If I was going to do it again I would mix up a big pitcher of a single color (or maybe two) and precut the paper, because I felt like set up was a big bottle neck to our creative exploration. Also, bigger paper.

Or, you know, we could go totally hard core like this artist, Tom Shannon, and build a radio controlled solenoid driven six color mixing monster pendulum. But we probably won’t. At least not this year.

I made this project up, but I’m sure I wasn’t the first! I gave my daughter a small glass jar with some baking soda in it, and asked her to mix in enough liquid watercolors to make a liquid. Then she painted with the baking soda paint. When she started asking me for a second jar so she could have another color I handed her a spray bottle of vinegar instead. It was fun and a bit silly.

This is also not the way to create archival works of art, and in fact, should not be stored with any other paper you want to save, since the acid in the vinegar will destroy paper over time.

The next thing we tried was making a thick paste – taking baking soda and adding just enough liquid water color until it stuck together. Then you can make little colored clumps and put them on your paper to make a fizzy colored circle. Lots of fizzing colors = fun!

Fun times. You should have seen my table when she was done. The vinegar and paint ran all the way from one end to the other. Next time… oh, hmm, you know, I don’t HAVE any cookie sheets with rims anymore… they were all non-stick and I got rid of them. I forgot that I used them for art projects too… OOPS!

I was shopping for something at the drug store, and there was a half gallon of epsom salt. Needed to be tried, so I bought it for our art group.

The basic idea is to make a salt solution, super saturated or not, mix it in with different colors of liquid water colors, then paint. As it dries it forms different crystal patterns, the type depending somewhat on the salt concentration that you mixed in, and whether the salt was fully dissolved. Epsom salts are cool because they naturally form much larger crystals than NaCl – table salt. Don’t ask me why, I’m lousy at chemistry. But it looks really pretty!