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 …
A Stable Blue from Asiatic Dayflower (Commelina communis) Read More »
The orange in sassafras root is quite vivid. I’m trying to capture that color in a watercolor paint.
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 …
Today I made several different shades of paint from red sandstone. Click through to read about my process and see the pictures.
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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.
A thoughtful person by the last name of Murdoch, who happens also to know a bit of geology, enjoyed my display over at Kingston Square Arts, bought a print, and then came back and left me a box of rocks. And today I embarked on a paint-making experiment with one of those rocks. It is …
A Paint-Making Experiment with Murdoch’s Mystery Rock Read More »