Back in the days before the "web", the best place to get a general introduction to just about anything was by finding the usenet newsgroup FAQ about it.

One of the better ones was the pyrotechnics FAQ, wherein you learn how to make cool stuff like black powder and thermite. At least as important, you learn how not to make them. Don't laugh... I can think of half a dozen times over the past ten years when some local news story of a fire lead back to a couple of guys screwing around with steel shavings and powdered aluminum. Sometimes the stories go back more than 10 years:

The Hindenburg fabric was found to be made of a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant. The observations of the fire listed above, in fact, are consistent with a huge aluminum fire.

In order to create paint that is not in fact rocket fuel, one must first know how rocket fuel is made, no?