Making Paint

The book "Discovering Great Artists" by MaryAnn F. Kohl and Kim Solga is used and recommended by Classical Conversations. I like the book both because of the projects and the information provided on the mediums and artists who would have used them. 

 I had heard from friends about a particular project where you made your paints and so we decided to give it a try for our first project. The first step was to use a rock to grind colored chalk into powder.

 Next we separated one egg yolk and white per color

 Then we mixed the egg yolks with 2 teaspoons of water per yolk until it was frothy

 Finally we added the egg mixture to our ground chalk to make our paint

 These were our three finished products. We should have considered how the yellow yolk would effect our final colors during our initial selection process. Oops! I guess you live and learn!

 The pinky/orange color was definitely the best and most preferred color for painting. Here are my little artists hard at work. :)

Here is part of the description provided in the book on the artist Giotto (ZHEE-O-TO) and this project which I found particularly interesting:

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"Many paintings of Giotto's time were made with egg tempera paint on special panels of wood. There were no art stores, so each artist had to make paint by grinding minerals, clay, berries, or even insects into fine powder and mixing this pigment with egg yolk and water. Egg tempera makes a thin, fast drying coat of bright color. The paint is very strong and long lasting. Giotto's beautiful egg tempera paintings are over 700 years old!"

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If you're looking for a fun as well as educational book to help plan art projects for your kids I would recommend checking this book out.