Play with your food: making art with rice

Play with your food: making art with rice

By Lisa Justice
Special to the Enterprise

The rice we eat usually only comes in two colors—white and brown.  But what if we had rice in lots of different colors?  Imagine the cool designs we could make if we had rice in every color of the rainbow.

Today we’ll be using some simple supplies you probably have at home to take plain, white rice and transform it into beautiful, multicolored art supplies.

What you’ll need:  several large mixing bowls (one for each color of rice you want to make), a spoon for each bowl, a teaspoon, rubbing alcohol, food coloring and rice.

Scoop one to two cups of uncooked rice into each bowl.  You don’t have to be precise about the amount.

Now add two to three drops of food coloring to each bowl.  You can make each bowl a different color, or you can try mixing colors.  What do you think might happen if you added red dye and blue dye to the same bowl?

Finally add about a teaspoon of rubbing alcohol to each bowl.  The alcohol picks up the dye, helps spread it around to all the grains of rice and then evaporates, leaving the color staining the rice. 

Once you’ve added all your ingredients, stir the rice, dye and alcohol together, making sure that each grain gets colored.  Some grains may get a little more color than others, so in your blue bowl you might have a few light blue ones and a few dark blue ones.

Now comes the hard part—wait!  Let each bowl sit for twenty to thirty minutes while the dye sets and dries.  While you wait, take a walk, have a snack or start planning an art project for your dyed rice. 

When the time is up, stir each bowl again to make sure that all the liquid has evaporated and all the rice is dry.  If you still have some moisture in your bowl, you can spread your rice out on a baking sheet to help it dry.

Once all your rice is dry, you can start an art project like a mosaic.  A mosaic is a design made of very small pieces like stones or grains of rice in different colors.  You combine the colors to make a pattern.

You could use yellow, brown and green grains to make a sunflower mosaic.  Or try combining blue, green and gray grains for an underwater scene.  The possibilities are endless.

Use the glue we made last week to stick your rice design onto paper or fabric for display.  You can save any unused rice for future art projects, but you shouldn’t cook and eat it once you’ve dyed it for art.  Visit us on Facebook to share what you made with your dyed rice.

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Explorit’s coming events:

• Explorit’s newest Exhibition, “Forces of Nature” is open the first Saturday and Sunday of every month from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.  This exhibition welcomes the public back to our 3141 5th Street Nature Center and will feature some of the best of Explorit’s past exhibits.

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Explorit Science Center is located at 3141 5th St. and is open to the public every first Saturday and Sunday of the month.  For more information call (530) 756-0191 or visit http://www.explorit.org, or “like” us on Facebook.