Category: Making Pigments
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A Yellow Paint Experiment | Lake pigment from thyme
Back when I made my very first set of paints, I had a really nice yellow. I’d made several yellows from various plants and did lightfast tests on them. All failed except for the one, gorgeous yellow. Not only did it pass, the yellow color actually intensified with the light exposure. At that time, I…
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A Stable Blue from Asiatic Dayflower (Commelina communis)
One day I smashed a flower petal from the Asiatic dayflower between my thumb and forefinger. It’s a small plant that grows sparsely in the shady, moist areas along the driveway. While it’s not native to the Ozarks, it is naturalized and I won’t mind using it to make a paint and calling it an…
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The Orange in Osage Root Bark
The orange in sassafras root is quite vivid. I’m trying to capture that color in a watercolor paint.
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Bone Black
I made bone black, from a cow vertebra that I charred inside a small tin inside the wood stove. Previously I’d used charred wood from hickory and oak. It has been a difficult paint to re-wet and it never reached the depth of black I wanted. It was also grainier than I liked. The charred…
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Paint from Red Sandstone
Today I made several different shades of paint from red sandstone. Click through to read about my process and see the pictures.
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What are Paleo Paints?
The Paleo Paints My husband once said my handmade paints reminded him of how the cave men made their paints for the cave drawings. And he was right! And so we called them Paleo Paints. I make them by crushing rocks, clay, charred wood, and extract certain leaves to create pigments which are then added…
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Appreciating the Brown Colors
Brown is such a ubiquitous color in the environment that it’s in danger of being invisible. But it’s very important in my palette of earthy colors.
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Shades of Shale
Black shale is a common rock in our creeks and streams. The rocks are brittle and easy to crumble, and make a dark gray rub. A great candidate for making some paint.
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Pottery Shard
A few weeks ago during my morning walk, I found an old pottery shard. So I put it in my pocket and finished my walk. It looked like it might make a nice paint, but I debated over whether or not to crush it. The shard, or sherd, as the term is known in archaeological…
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Wild Waterfall Shale
This rock lives near the waterfall and because of the various hues of colors I saw in it, became one of my first few sets of paints. I called it “Waterfall Shale”. I think it’s really slate, though.
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Pink Tequila
Pink Tequila comes from a pink sandstone, but the resulting paint or pigment color isn’t pink at all. Or at least, not very much. It’s closer to orange, but there is a slight pink tinge to the orange. This one, like so many others have the past year, surprised me. As a stone, it looks…
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Cromwell’s Sunrise
Cromwell’s Sunrise is a warm golden yellow Wild Ozark Paleo Paint made from a stone of northwest Arkansas. This color began with a rock gifted to me by another northwest Arkansas artist. He saw it while out hiking and thought I might like to try making a paint from it. The Swatch I don’t have…
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Black. The Messiest Color Start to Finish.
Sometimes I’m overzealous with the black. More honestly put, I am almost always too generous with the black. I put more on than I need and so end up taking a lot of it right back off. Why I love Black And that highlights one of the great things about my black handmade watercolor paint.…
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Red leaves of black gum (Nyssa sylvatica)
Black gum leaves begin turning deep red near the end of summer, sometimes long before any other leaves are starting to think of autumn. This color is made from the late summer red leaves of black gum (also called black tupelo). It’s a tree native to the Ozarks and one of the few light-fast sources…