Heat Sensitive Colour Change Table

Hi,

And I am back with another Instructable that makes use of thermochromic pigment. In this instructable i will show you how to use some thermochromic pigment to up-cycle an old table. Its really simple and I made this one with some of the young people out at Lambhill stables, a community center that does workshops for all ages.

Materials

A table

Thermochromic pigment - I'm using the red powdered kind for this one. I got it sent over from America but its easily purchasable via maplin in liquid form as well. Something to note is because we are mixing it with acrylic the end colour will be lighter but i will go into that more in the "paint it up" step

Acrylic paint. I'm using white here as the colour change is more dramatic.

masking tape

Clear varnish

Tools

Sandpaper or if you have one an electric sander (remember your safety wear)

Something to mix your paint in

Paintbrush

Hairdryer (optional if you want to speed up the drying process)

As the title suggests you want to sand it down until you have any existing varnish removed

Tape it up

Using the masking tape you can tapew up the edges of the table here. This is purely for decorative reasons as we wanted to show some of the wood next to the paint.

Mix it up

Mix your paint and pigment. As mentioned before because you are mixing it with acrylic paint you are going to get some colour change. as i am using white with red its lightened down to a more pinky colour pink. Take this into consideration when mixing your paint/pigment as you can get some nice colour changes, For example mixing red pigment with yellow paint will give you an orange paint that turns yellow under heat or blue pigment with red paint will give you a purple paint that turns red.

Paint it up

Pretty straight forward and once you are done remove the tape. you can let it dry naturally or you can speed things up with the hair dryer. if you do so just remember its supposed to change colour with heat so dont panic. once its dry give it a few coats of varnish to help protect the surface. we ended up doing three.

Once the varnish has dried that you done!

as you can see from the pictures its fun to make patterns with your coffee mugs or splashes of warm water.

Before i finish i would just like to give a special thanks to Beth, Reese, Emily, Holly and David from Lambhill Stables who helped upcycle this table :)

I hope you enjoyed this instructable and please feel free to leave any comments, questions or pictures of your own colour changing creations below.