Straightforward Hands-on Art With Food Coloring

All week I imagined a big office stencil reveal post here. Sadly, it is not done yet. Oh Hands-on, why do you take such pleasure in toying with my emotions? Quit playing games with my heart, home improvement. But regardless of the fact that it is not exactly a swift project, it is looking excellent and totally going to be worth the blood, sweat, and tears (all three of which have occurred, incidentally). So hopefully by this weekend I will be doing some celebratory Rocky laps around the house (yes, with music blaring and fists in the air) and I can share photos & deets of the whole shebang on Monday. Woot! Until then, here is a still-needs-to-be-wrapped up wall (the bottom edge above the chair rail is still on the agenda):

In the meantime, how about a bloodless-sweatless-and-tearless project in the “swift, straightforward, and free” vein? See, John had this genius idea that we should try to get an ombre effect on paper (that we could then frame) using food coloring. Namely soaking it in food-colored water and waiting for it to travel up the page and potentially upping the intensity by adding more color to the water and letting it soak a bit less for a two-toned effect.

Yeah… that did not work at all. Zero travel-age back up the paper. Simply wetness. Haha. So…

… fail!

But we had some lively messing around with drips and drops, simply to see what we liked. First I made an ode to Dexter with a few drops of red food coloring.

How lively would stuff like this look framed all over the house for a Halloween party? You could even take regular family photos and splash “blood” (aka: red food coloring spatters) over them to weird the observant people out at your little shindig (or use a red sharpie to create the effect on clear transparency paper and place it over them so as not to ruin the original prints/photos).

Anyway, then we began messing around with drips down the page but we truly fell in love when we hit on this plain collection of dots (we were using regular old card stock by the way):

All we did was make three dots of each color next to each other (squeezing a bit harder on the middle one so it was a wee bit larger). Then we simply waited for it to dry…

… and framed it…

Bam, an instant zero dolla (holla!) “food coloring masterpiece” for our consistently-changing gallery frame wall:

I in fact enjoy how it picks up on the circles in the fabric that we framed a few feet up (in the middle). And it is so lively to tell people who come over (and simply stand in front of that wall for twenty minutes) that it is simply drops of food coloring. I cannot truly explain why, but it looks kind of exotic and collector-ish. So it is consistently lively to see the look on their faces when they realize it was done in five minutes with cupcake baking supplies.

Anyone else going to try their hand at some food coloring art? Or throw a Dexter-themed Halloween party? If so, I would ENJOY to see pics of any and all faux blood spatter that you use as decor! Geek for life.

In other news, that might be the shortest post I have written in about a year. Hootie hoo for trying to meet some lately mentioned goals. We have certainly had our share of long beefy posts this week, so sometimes a quickie here or there feels pleasant too. Wait, that did not come out right.