Rainbow Tile Art Coasters

This tile art is a fun, easy and beautiful way to create beautiful tiles using just household supplies. We have made these several times in our Makerspace now, and no matter how young or old, artistic or otherwise, everybody gets involved and has a great time making them!

One of the great things about these tiles is that they utilise regular household items that you probably already have around the house already. They are a great boredom buster, and make a fantastic group activity, particularly in mixed groups as everyone can have fun regardless of their skill levels!

Much of what you will need can be found around the house.

You will need:

• Plain white tiles
• Sharpie or other alcohol based markers
• Isopropyl alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol)
• Lacquer or varnish, to seal
• Sheet foam, to back if using as coasters

Paint onto the tile with your markers. Blocks of colour work best - they will become distorted later when you add the alcohol. Part of the joy and fun of the project is trying different patterns and seeing how they end up!

The next thing is to spray some isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol onto the tile. When you add alcohol, you add a little bit of magic!

The alcohol will spread and mix the marker inks to create awesome abstract patterns. You can use a dropper to enhance the patterns further. It is best to use small amounts of alcohol and add more once dried if you want to - if you add large amounts at a time you will end up with pooled areas and spaces with no ink, or else all of the ink blended entirely.

The joy of this project is playing to find out what works and what doesn't. We had a lot of fun creating patterns then finding out how they would look at the end.

If you want to use tiles as coasters and trivets, you can back with felt or (cheaper!) some foam packing. Either glues on nicely with a little PVA glue.

These tiles are seriously addictive! We do these as group activities - here are some of the artworks participants came up with. They would make awesome gifts! I hope you liked this instructable and that you have fun making these tiles :-)