Turn Dried Up Markers into Watercolour Paints

This is one of my favourite upcycling projects — turning old, dried-up markers into awesome liquid watercolour paints that you can craft and create with. And once we've made the paints, I'll show you how we used ours for a simple Earth Day art activity.

Liquid watercolours, if you’re not familiar with them, are fabulous for painting and crafting with, and they’re great for conducting colourful art experiments with. You can buy liquid watercolours at most craft stores, but they tend to be a little expensive. Making our own saves us quite a bit of money, which means we can use them a little more liberally than we would if we’d paid 10 or 15 dollars for them.

Let me show you how it's done!

What You'll Need:

• a collection of dried-up, water-based (washable) markers
• glass jars
• water
• needle-nose pliers
• scissors

How It's Made:

To begin, the kids sort our dried-out markers into colour groups. That’s always a fun activity in itself.

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When we have our colours all organized, we remove the lids, and place the markers, tips down, into the jars. Then we add about a 1/3 of a cup of water to each jar.

We swish the markers around in the water a little, and then we let them sit for several days. We check our jars daily to observe the water becoming darker and darker.

After a few days, I use the pliers to remove the ends of the markers and pull out the ink inserts. Those inserts usually still contain lots of colour, so I cut them up with the scissors and I let those pieces sit in the jars for a few more days. FYI: that step can be a bit messy, so I use the kitchen sink as my work space.

After another couple of days, your watercolours will be ready!

Remove the chopped-up felt pieces, and start creating!

You can use your liquid watercolours full-strength, or if you'd rather, you can dilute them with a small amount of water.

To store your watercolours, just pop a lid on the jar. They will keep indefinitely.

A simple Earth Day art activity: 

For Earth Day, we decided to use our liquid watercolours and a few cotton makeup pads for an absorption experiment.

Don’t the results look like little replicas of the planet Earth?

The kids used pipettes (or medicine droppers) to drip green and blue colour on to their cotton pads. Droppers are terrific for developing fine motor skills and co-ordination.  

It’s a whole lot of fun dribbling colour onto the pads, and watching it quickly spread as it’s absorbed into the cotton.

What will we do with our miniature Earths? We might create a collage with them, or string them into necklaces or use them to decorate homemade greeting cards.

Happy Earth Day, everyone!