INDN 341: Food Colouring Grid Test

Over the weekend I decided to try out some of the suggestions that Jeongbin gave to us. The suggestion that I really rolled with was the suggestion to impregnate paper with food colouring to use as a "water activated paper". Applying the food colouring to the paper and then letting it dry would essentially allow the paper to wait indefinitely for water to drip onto the paper. Upon wetting, the food colouring "re-activates" and spreads with the water.

Applying the food colouring to the paper was no easy feat, and keeping the grid consistent was even harder. Ah well. That's okay, because the result wasn't exactly dependant on an even spread. The result is more dependant on the effect of the water.

And the result turned out really well! The water arriving on the paper activated the food colouring and let it spread across the page in a surprisingly aesthetic way. It creates an almost marbled look that flows around the shape of the hand in a kind of abstracted and jagged way. One problem that we encountered when testing the paper that I prepared was that the food colouring ended up staining the person's hand quite badly. A simple countermeasure to this would be to put a grating in between the paper and the person's hand or face. The result could be slightly more "blurry" than if the person was in direct contact with the paper, but that's not too bad.

A suggestion from one of our tutors was to look at creating a space where the confession could be written. A way to make that happen that I thought of would be to only put the grid of food colouring around a circle where the average palm would sit and fit. The result would be that the dots would only sit along and around the outer rim of the shape of the hand, ensuring that the colouration would be delivered without the writing space obscured by the colour dots. More to think about!