DIY Gradient Wood Tasting Spoon Pendant Light – Part 2 – Mixing Paint For A Rainbow Gradient

Here’s a look at my favorite piece of art that I’ve ever made. I made this out of over 800 tasting spoon bowls after cutting the handles off.

I shared Part 1 of this gradient pendant light project a while back. I built the frame for it out of 15 lampshade rings, beading wire, and screw-on crimp beads.

This light will take even more tasting spoon bowls than the artwork did, so I’ve been tackling those as I have time. I already have all of the handles cut off of all of the spoons that I’ll need, so I’ve been taking an hour here and there to sand the spoon bowls to prep them for primer and paint.

I had purchased a few colors to use on my pendant light, and I needed to use those few paints to create a 15-color rainbow gradient for the pendant light. I purchased six colors, all Americana brand of craft paint: Tuscan Red, Royal Fuchsia, Cadmium Yellow, Hauser Light Green, Peacock Teal, and Purple Pizzazz. When I got them all lined up, I realized that I had forgotten orange, so I went into my stash of craft paint and grabbed a FolkArt Pumpkin to fill in that gap.

Since I need 15 colors for my pendant light, I lined up 15 little cups for paint.

And then I added the seven colors I had to every other cup.

And then I started on the fun part — mixing the paint to create the gradient from one color to the next. To do this, I mixed equal parts of each color in the empty cup between those colors. For example, in the second cup, I mixed equal parts of Tuscan Red and Royal Fuchsia.

I continued this process until I had all of the empty cups filled. For the two last empty cups, I basically circled back to the red. So the first one was the purple (which I lightened with white) with a tiny bit of red added. The last cup was the purple, a little white, and even more red added.

With all 15 cups filled, I was ready to test out the gradient. Here’s how it looked.

It was a good start, but there were some obvious problems. To my eye, that third color stood out like a sore thumb. I decided to eliminate the pure color altogether, but keep it for mixing in with the neighboring colors. The yellow looked too bright. The transition between the yellow-green and the green looked too drastic. Same with the transition between the turquoise and teal colors. And that last color looked completely out of place.

So I got to mixing again. I removed that third paint color, but mixed in a bit of it with the neighboring colors to smooth out that transition. I did more mixing to smooth out those other transitions with the yellows and greens. I added a touch of green and white to the yellow to tone it down. And then I removed that last bothersome color, and just mixed something completely new, leaving out the red altogether.

This second attempt was definitely better, but it still had some problems. The first red seemed too dark. The transition between the coral/pink color and the orange was too drastic. And the transition between the turquoise, teal, and purple wasn’t working for me. And finally, that last color didn’t seem much different from the one next to it.

So on my third attempt, I softened the first red with a bit of white and just a touch of that fuchsia that I removed front the lineup. To soften the transition between the coral/pink and the orange, I mixed a bit more orange into the coral/pink, and I mixed a bit of the pink into the orange. And then I I smoothed out the transition in those last colors by adding more teal to the purple, and adding some dark blue (from my stash) and red to the last color to make a darker eggplant color.