Some people say spoonies aren't adventurous and don't take risks.
Sure, mate.
You try moving a muller when your neck and shoulder muscles don't work. & BTW, I just made benzymidazole yellow watercolour paint, from scratch, while wearing a white t-shirt. 😂😂😂 Risk is a relative thing.
Here's to my disabled AF & proud friends, chronically ill creatives, and everyone else out here risking our spoons every day. 🥄
More mulling left to do, but the color off my pokeberry lake is spectacular! I am so glad because I really didn't want to go back in the brambles to get to my local patch. I love these berries, I used to play with them when I was younger growing up in Atlanta. I would make ink from them and mix it with my mud paint I made from the red clay. I've always been fascinated by colors found in nature, and I get excited when I find one as vibrant as the phthalos and quins.
This deep pink colour is from an old jar of Otto Ebeling dark madder (krapplack-dunkel) I inherited. I'm pretty sure it's alizarin PR83. I've got a sample of Kremer's alizarine crimson PR83 pigment, so I'm making up a little of each to compare them. Then we'll see how they both look side by side!
Alizarin has been used for hundreds of years as a pigment, and used to be extracted from madder plant roots. In the 19th century it became the first natural dye to be reproduced synthetically. Today you can buy both synthetic and plant-derived madder pigments. Some people prefer quinacridone pigments that are more light-fast - and I do use those for commission work. But I also have a soft spot for madder & have paints with both plant-derived and synthetic alizarin in. So it's pretty cool to be making my own now 😊
want to get back into egg tempra this summer. anyone know any good pigment brands that make colors that are bright/unatural/saturated that work well with egg tempra?
I have discovered a lake pigment that smells worse than days upon days of cabbage.
Alkanet!
But wait, It’s Indigo with the steel chair!!
I didn’t even go for the fermentation method, I just took some powdered indigo (used for hair dye, got it at the Indian Market for like $5, so much cheaper than buying it from a dye shop, and yes I know the quality is probably not as high, but in this experimental state I am fine with that) and it reeks. Luckily making it alkali (a nice fancy 12 on the pH scale) didn’t make the smell worse like I was worried it would, but I had to drain it earlier than I intended to because every time I went to my kitchen island turned alchemy table the smell was just too much.
BUT I did get some indigo. I precipitated some onto chalk and it is a wonderfully pale indigo, and I got probably enough pigment to make a full pan and once it finished drying I will mull it up. I have almost a full bag so I can try to make more...once I get my nerve up to deal with stinky. I also need a better way to get oxygen in the vat to oxidize the indigo particles other than whisking and pouring the jars back and forth.
A lot of my lake pigment research is reverse engineering stuff about dyes and turning them into lakes. Sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes it fails catastrophically because pH is mean. But up next is some Indian madder root experiments, including dyeing a white cotton shirt into a lovely red.