Painting with Oobleck
Cornstarch + water + food coloring = hours of fun.
This substance is a rheopectic liquid. Rhe-o-pec-tic. The viscosity increases over time the more it is disturbed. It looks thin and runny until you shake it, then it turns solid. This makes it a fascinating substance for painting. If you stir it (or hit it) with your paintbrush, it becomes thicker. If it's thin and you rub it on the concrete with a brush or your fingers, it gets thicker as you work with it.
Warning: if you use food dye, and you handle it a lot, your hands will become stained. This was fun for us, but might not be fun for you. Here's a photo of a child whose hands are the same color as her shirt.
Here's a link to her experiment and tutorial: https://youtu.be/L3y0Q7mZLV4?si=3HLzPf-A1qouWtDV
(food color optional)
Is it solid? Is it fluid?
Who cares? It's sure fun for painting!
Oobleck is the name of this non-newtonian fluid. And it was a hit for all ages.
Here are some photos of us having fun painting and playing with this on the sidewalk.
Here is a picture of a girl's messy hands as she handles the Oobleck.
Want a deeper understanding of non-newtonian fluids? I really liked this write up explaining them.
#art
#outside
#chalkpaint
#play
Because this is just cornstarch and water, as the water evaporates it becomes just cornstarch again. The mess you leave behind is like chalk on the sidewalk.
Here is a child pouring some of the somewhat thickened Oobleck out of a pitcher onto the concrete, making a marble design.
A special thank you to Kitchen Table Classroom for this fun idea. Here is a link to her blog post where she teaches us how to make sidewalk chalk paint. We added extra cornstarch and mixed it to transform it to Oobleck.
Here's a link to a video of us enjoying this messy art activity on YouTube:
Other Creators
Our friends had another awesome activity to try! Why not walk on Oobleck? Here's a link from Science Sparks.
We love the video that Emily's Science Lab has on Oobleck!
Materials
Do you want to purchase the materials for this activity on Amazon? We will make a little bit of money if you order through these links.
Argo brand Cornstarch https://amzn.to/454EGjf
Wilton Primary Gel Food Colors https://amzn.to/3KagH8k
Pro Grade metal and boar hair paint brushes, 36 count.
Clear cups with lids, disposable https://amzn.to/4bIMfxR
An anonymous friend provided this feedback after reading this post:
ReplyDeleteI am sad that I didn't learn about tensors in school.
I still feel left behind because of it! Like gee thanks, thank you for overcomplicating my life! Learning about scalars, and then vectors, then matricies, and only now in optional for some physics module do you give us this simple concept that completely changes the way we look at everything and have learnt up until now and simplifies everything we have ever leant a great deal, and thus will take time to process all of this big change in how we see the world, time that we do not have as you only talk about it now to teach us Einstein's formulation of Relativity, which exists as only a small leap from what one already knew at the time if formulated using the tensor equations which everyone back then used! Not to mention understanding stresses and strains,something which we learnt about at school in 1d because our teachers happily glossed over the fact that we needed tensors to do anything with it in real life!