I use the lake pigment method to make most of my paints, though it’s a little different for blueberries — I soak them in isopropyl instead of water to make dye.
After that I use an acid/base reaction to precipitate the colour out of solution, let it dry, pulverize the resulting hard cake of pigment, and mix with glycerine, honey, gum arabic solution and clove oil to make watercolour paint I dry in pans.
Yes, my muller is a glass butt plug and my pallette is a microwave platter. I’m industrious, not rich.
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I was not expecting to learn that art supplies can be enjoyed anally. What a time to be alive.
I also enjoyed learning about the process of pigment making. I wonder how many colors I could make from plants within walking distance from my home…?
Purple rain might not be what we thought it was.
I choked on my noodles.
The plug is dedicated to paint, fortunately.
Depending on where you live, you could get a whole colour wheel. I have yellow to peach to brown from birch bark, light green from a blue spruce, deep green from mint. Marigolds, weld and roses can all do yellows and oranges. I chip off iron oxide-rich rocks rom the cliff sides to get deep oranges and browns. If you have copper, you can make verdigris. I get blues from red cabbage and red roses, too. Eggshells for white.
Oh, and I ground up all the dead pill bugs in my basement for gray. You really gotta think outside the box.
Hmm, this sounds like a fun hobby. I’ll look into trying something simple when the summer comes.
I used to get a beautiful blue-green from juniper berries that I used for calligraphy. Never thought of actually making a paint out of it though. Neat.
That’s one I forgot. Juniper grows around here and I make inks, too. Thanks for reminding me.
I had a “primitive art is better” phase back when I had art classes. I liked to make art with as few refined materials as possible. My favorite project was calligraphy on stone (whitewashed slate) using crushed berries for ink and cut leaves as nibs. It was neither long lasting nor particularly precise but it certainly was satisfying.
I can appreciate the vibe of old tempera with fugutive pigments, even if it’s accidental and technically not what the artists were going for. I try to balance it out with newschool methods of preserving anything I think is good.
And that sounds awesome, do you have any pictures?
Nahhh this was probably 20 years ago. Im a stuffy old machinist now after welding for 15 years. Not much room for art these days.
Sorry to hear that. Welding is pretty intriguing to me.
Welding is an art unto itself. I specialized in TIG welding, which is the real pretty rainbow looking kind if you get it right. Sadly, nobody is going to appreciate a mint weld down inside the intercooler on an apache helicopter, or inside some satellite that’ll be floating around this rock god knows how long, or a pretty little braze holding together a shattered bearing housing on a generator in a hydroelectric dam.
But I know they’re there, and that comes with its own satisfaction.
Just dropping space cred like it’s nothing.
That’s amazing, thanks for sharing.
Wow, so cool! And very inspiring! I like that you are so creative - with your tools and your sources for pigments.
Thank you. Poverty breeds ingenuity!
I just wanted to dye my own wool instead of having to buy all the colours. It was a slippery slope from there to blueberry paint.
edit: typo
Very pleasant photograph :)
Thank you. It’s quite relaxing to grind the paint, almost like one of those desk top sand gardens.
Impressive
The staining that comes from blueberries and other food stuffs is a big part of why they are so healthy. It creates an antioxidization layer throughout your whole gut system which is great for keeping cells alive.
Eat blueberries, lots of them, all the time.
Can you expand a little on the acid/base reaction? What do you add to the iso?
Sure thing. I’m no chemist so this will be basic, according to my understanding.
The acid/base reaction is the lake pigment method, essentially. I use aluminum sulphate, which bonds to the pigment, then by adding soda ash the bonded pigment precipitates out of the solution.
Ordinarily I use water to create the dye bath, which is just pulling the pigment into solution - like making tea. I had trouble getting blueberry and cranberry pigment to precipitate, so isopropyl was recommended to me to use instead of water. It works much better.
To sum it up, I add blueberries to isopropyl to make the dye bath, then add aluminum sulphate, then soda ash.
