11th Grade 2nd Semester
Chemists are Artists
For the chemists are artists project, we were tasked with creating a work of art for the new STEM building using some form of chemistry. My group of Mateo Esubio, Ethan Fonarev, and Chapin Williams decided that we would create paints out of different chemicals as our use of chemistry. We also decided that it would be a great idea to link some chemicals in the brain, hormones, by basing the art project on the emotions of STEM, and how you feel while taking the class. Because of this, we named our project Reactions of the Mind, and based each of our panels off of the chemicals we chose. We decided it would look best if we did multiple layers of glass and painted through the layers so it had a sort of depth effect. The slideshow is posted below:
Chemicals of the Mind:
There were four chemicals chosen to represent the feelings of STEM: Dopamine(happiness), Melatonin(sleep), Serotonin(love), and my chemical Adrenaline(anger). I chose adrenaline because it is the hormone that induces stress, anger, and the fight or flight response. These are all extremely important to STEM because one of the most important parts of any science is getting stressed and frustrated, and occasionally even kicking in the flight response to take a break, but without the frustration of failed work, we would have no motivation to push on.
Paints:
The paints we chose to create were red ochre, malachite, yellow ochre, and a mystery sea foam green. The malachite was the only paint making that really went according to plan with its original color, while the red ochre turned brown, the sea foam green was a complete accident, and the yellow ochre did not form a precipitate. As I was in charge of creating the yellow ochre, I was extremely disappointed that it did not create any sort of usable paint. Originally, it made a completely discolored mixture with no precipitates, so I tried it again and though it had no precipitate this time either, it did create a very nice yellow color. Even if the paints did not turn out the way we wanted them to, it is important as well to fail to realize what you had done wrong, and I believe that I have figured that out. I found my information from Pigments Through the Ages at webexibits.org, and the site says that the materials needed are Cobalt(II) Chloride, Potassium Nitrate, and Acetic Acid. They also say how to make it: "1 g of cobalt(II)-chloride is solved in 20 ml of deionized water and acidified with approximately 1 ml concentrated acetic acid. 8 g potassium nitrite is then solved in 20 ml of deionized water and slowly added to the cobalt chloride solution. The resulting precipitate is washed and filtered off"(webexibits.org). This was supposed to have the equation:
CoCl2 + 7KNO2 + 2CH3COOH → K3[Co(NO2)6] + NO + 2KCl + H2O + 2CH3COOK
I believe that the issue I likely had was that the only mixture we had was Sodium Nitrite instead of Potassium Nitrite, and this likely stopped the precipitate from forming.
Reflection:
I thought overall during this project I worked fairly productively, even though the precipitate did not form for my paint. Two major pits were the paint not forming, leading to us not having a yellow ochre, and being too impatient with the paints, smearing each coat instead of being careful which made my artwork look angry, like it was supposed to, but not as neat as it could have been. Two peaks were my research of the chemicals used in the paint, and the research of the hormone I chose, which I believe I understood pretty in-depth. All of my group members worked fairly well and we were a great team together, so I believe this project was a successful one.
There were four chemicals chosen to represent the feelings of STEM: Dopamine(happiness), Melatonin(sleep), Serotonin(love), and my chemical Adrenaline(anger). I chose adrenaline because it is the hormone that induces stress, anger, and the fight or flight response. These are all extremely important to STEM because one of the most important parts of any science is getting stressed and frustrated, and occasionally even kicking in the flight response to take a break, but without the frustration of failed work, we would have no motivation to push on.
Paints:
The paints we chose to create were red ochre, malachite, yellow ochre, and a mystery sea foam green. The malachite was the only paint making that really went according to plan with its original color, while the red ochre turned brown, the sea foam green was a complete accident, and the yellow ochre did not form a precipitate. As I was in charge of creating the yellow ochre, I was extremely disappointed that it did not create any sort of usable paint. Originally, it made a completely discolored mixture with no precipitates, so I tried it again and though it had no precipitate this time either, it did create a very nice yellow color. Even if the paints did not turn out the way we wanted them to, it is important as well to fail to realize what you had done wrong, and I believe that I have figured that out. I found my information from Pigments Through the Ages at webexibits.org, and the site says that the materials needed are Cobalt(II) Chloride, Potassium Nitrate, and Acetic Acid. They also say how to make it: "1 g of cobalt(II)-chloride is solved in 20 ml of deionized water and acidified with approximately 1 ml concentrated acetic acid. 8 g potassium nitrite is then solved in 20 ml of deionized water and slowly added to the cobalt chloride solution. The resulting precipitate is washed and filtered off"(webexibits.org). This was supposed to have the equation:
CoCl2 + 7KNO2 + 2CH3COOH → K3[Co(NO2)6] + NO + 2KCl + H2O + 2CH3COOK
I believe that the issue I likely had was that the only mixture we had was Sodium Nitrite instead of Potassium Nitrite, and this likely stopped the precipitate from forming.
Reflection:
I thought overall during this project I worked fairly productively, even though the precipitate did not form for my paint. Two major pits were the paint not forming, leading to us not having a yellow ochre, and being too impatient with the paints, smearing each coat instead of being careful which made my artwork look angry, like it was supposed to, but not as neat as it could have been. Two peaks were my research of the chemicals used in the paint, and the research of the hormone I chose, which I believe I understood pretty in-depth. All of my group members worked fairly well and we were a great team together, so I believe this project was a successful one.