Painting with food colouring

My friend James Tan lent me these bottles of food colouring to try a few days ago. He said that this is Drewscape's latest secret to colouring his sketches. So I'm sharing his secret to everyone now. LOL. Artists should always share their knowledge.

These are actually food colouring. The blue bottle's made by Star Brand (Malaysia) while the rest are from Bake King (Singapore). I was told they are very affordable, like USD $1 per bottle, way cheaper than Ecoline Liquid Watercolor, Dr PH Martin's Hydrus Watercolor or the Pebeo Colorex Ink.

Each bottle is around 25ml. This is just colouring, there's no flavour although I was told there are also flavourings sold in this type of bottle.

When buying, look for the ingredients to make sure that they are water-filtered, contain water so as not to buy the wrong thing. A quick search on "liquid food coloring" on Amazon showed different results.

If you want to get it, it might be good to invest in a few cheap plastic droppers so that you can get the liquid out from the bottle. I tried pouring and was not careful and it stained my hands.

I don't suppose these are going to be lightfast. Most liquid watercolour are not lightfast as they are mostly like dyed ink. Although Dr Ph Martin claims that their Hydrus liquid watercolour are lightfast.

These are the colour swatches and some mixtures created from the five bottles. The colours are very intense. The colours that I have are Orange, Cochineal Red (Cherry Red), Apple Green, Brown and Blue. Only the brown liquid is quite viscous, and has some sort of granulation going on.

The scan above is straight from the scanner without editing.

Here's my sketch. The colours are easy to mix but you have to be careful because they are very strong. Since it's the first time I'm using it, I wasn't so sure about how much to dilute them. It would be good to test it out of a spare piece of paper first.

Here's a video of my colouring process with lots of Oops.