Submitted by: Submitted by deathboy64
Views: 789
Words: 1813
Pages: 8
Category: Science and Technology
Date Submitted: 07/04/2012 06:20 AM
Make your own markers
Abstract
Do you ever wonder how markers are made? Where do all of those colors come from? Many of the colorful dyes we use come from plant pigments. Pigments are what make the world around us so colorful. How do chemists turn those natural plant pigments into art supplies? In this science project, become a chemist and make your own marker out of a drinking straw and homemade plant dye!
Objective
In this science project, you will extract plant pigment and use paper chromatography to compare the pigments to color molecules in water-soluble markers.
Introduction
Many modern products are made using bright colors. The many colors come from colored molecules that are mixed into the material used to make the product. There are many examples, including food, plastics, art supplies, and fabric. Some colored molecules are synthetic, like the famous Yellow #5, found in many candies and food products. Others are made from natural pigments found in plants.
A pigment is a protein molecule from a plant that reflects a certain color of light from the sun. This color is reflected and seen by your eye, which tells your brain that you are seeing a certain color. Sometimes plants contain many pigments that mix together, but your eyes see the pigments as only one color.
Oftentimes, the colors that we see in nature or in manufactured products are mixtures of different-colored molecules. Even though our eye sees the result as one color, each of the separate color molecules stays true to its own color in the mixture. One way to see this is to find a way to separate out the individual color molecules from the mixture, to reveal their unique colors.
Chromatography is the way chemists separate the components of a mixture into individual molecules. During chromatography, the components of a mixture start out in the same place, but are separated by their chemical properties. The type of paper chromatography you will use separates pigment molecules based on...