You can use a few things. You can paint it using you food coloring (Americolor is the one I´ve tried) straight from the bottle. It works pretty well since the colors are very intense; however, I would not recommend doing this with big pieces. It could take a long time.
You could also use petal dust or luster dust mixed in with lemon extract or vodka (I´m used the latter). The disadvantage to this is that you will probably need to do more than one coat, let it dry in between... it´s more time consuming.
You could always color the gumpaste and the use the luster dust for a shine.
I hope this helps.
Inma
Yup, just mix luster, petal, pixie dusts with a clear spirit or extract--I use vodka too. If you do want the instense colors that you can get with the color gels (Americolor), go ahead and mix some of that with the vodka too. It thins it down enough to paint very easily but keeps the color. The clear spirits dry rather quickly, so that is why they are used and some of the dusts aren't water soluable anyway. If you do need the piece darker, just wait 'til the first coat is dry (really shouldn't take very long) and then add the second (or more) coats as needed.
I use vodka and I wipe the brush a bit before and after dipping in the color. I've never had a problem. See below an example of a scene I painted on a gumpaste plaque.
Wow, that's amazing! Thanks for sharing. I don't have any dusts, but I'll try and get some. I think I'll color the gumpaste brown, so that I can just do details and such instead of trying to pain the whole thing brown afterwards. (for my rocking chair) I'm trying to get psyched to do the rollout soon. LOL. I've never done it before. I have all the pieces for the template. I've racked my brain and I think that I might just have to use bamboo skewers as the back pieces because I don't think I'll be able to put it together with slats. I'm going to cut lots of extra just in case.
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