A Pelican Bay inmate serving life in solitary confinement for second-degree murder creates amazing images with paint brewed from M&Ms. Snip from NYT article by Adam Liptak:
[Donny Johnson] orders his supplies from the prison commissary once a month. The M&M's are 60 cents a pack, and he gets 10 packs at a time. He puts from one to five of the candies in each of the jelly containers, drizzles a little water in and later fishes out the chocolate cores, leaving liquid of various colors, which get stronger if they sit for a couple of days.
He has tried other candy, but there are perils. "It's the same process with Skittles," he said, "but I end up eating them all."
Sometimes he experiments with other materials. "Grape Kool-Aid in red M&M color makes a kind of purple," he wrote in a letter to a reporter not long ago. "Coffee mixed with yellow makes a light brown. Tropical punch Kool-Aid granules can be made into a syrup and used as a paint wash of sorts. But it's a bear to work with and it's super-sticky and it never dries."
And there are frustrations. "If lint gets in a piece, I feel like screaming," he wrote.
