Skittle Art

A few weeks ago I was watching YouTube and this particular lady was talking about how to do art in prison. There were some super cheap and easy hacks for artist’s however only one hack interested me.The hack in question was using Skittles (the sweets) instead of watercolour paints.

I started by placing a purple, yellow, green, orange and a red skittle in separate small containers. I used lids off bottles.

I squeezed two drops of water in each lid with my squeezable water brush (purchased from the range in a pack of three)

I leave the Skittles for a while to settle and in the meantime I draw some sketches ready for when I am painting. Usually when I do watercolours I am attracted to lakes and the ocean with the sunset above. However this time I decided to be different and do a sunset over land and I could challenge myself to paint grass rather than my typical water scene.

I noticed that the colour from the Skittles were not really bleeding out at this point so I added further water drops until the deeper coloured paint started to show.The first colour I start applying is the green for the grass although this does not on paper have the effect I am looking for I did wonder whether more colour was necessary. So I add a further Skittles to each pot with the intention of increasing the colour. The first skittle in each pot had totally lost its colour at this point and only the white sweet was left, the chewy bit.

After a while the colour started to develop and this second sweet had clearly helped this along.The green paint was not drying with the desired effect I was looking for so at this point I added further paint to my picture.

The sky was now started using the purple skittle, as with the previous colour the colour was not showing so I decided to try a new technique, I stroked the brush on the actually skittle(the second one that had not lost its colour)instead of soaking the liquid up. The effect was much better this time it gave a three line pattern the top line being dark purple, middle more blue and then purple again.

I squeezed a drop of water in the centre of the page where the sunset would be and then it was time to try the orange skittle. I placed the skittle on the water on the page this time to try a different effect. The orange bled out way beyond the water drop circle this created a glowing effect and it was at this point that I made the decision not to resist the smells any longer and eat the skittles that hardest be used out of the packets.I had realised this was not going to plan and therefore decided to leave the painting to dry.

The following day I came back to the picture, I pick it up and the water slides down the page having not dried as I expected. Clearly skittles and me do not produce art work that I can be proud of. Unfortunately the skittles did not enhance my work but made it look like it was more at home in nursery school. Using skittles was not in my opinion ideal to use but I suppose if you have no other materials you could get away with them but I believe the key is making sure the paint is dry before adding more paint.