Material Diversions
My husband and I went for a walk at a local river, last weekend. While he snapped pictures of the lovely surroundings, I became obsessed with all these rocks that were crumbling along the riverbank. My mind immediately jumped to: pigment source!
There were two types of rocks that were undergoing this crumbling: a purple-brown type of a rock, and green-grey rock. I took samples of both.
I’ve since turned the brown one into paint. It is very grainy, unsurprisingly as I’m less than practiced at grinding to the right fineness. That said, the texture was very similar to the Rublev natural pigments tubes that I have. I have enough of the stone to try a few different times, and the river isn’t that far away in case I want to source more.
In colour, it is somewhere near Winsor Newton burnt umber, if slightly lighter and less red.
I followed a process posted by Natural Pigments6.
Continuing my thread of finding pigments in my environment. My husband and I went for a few hikes this last couple weeks and there were a number of really good candidate stones for pigments. I’m starting to get an eye for which stones can be ground down and what colours they may produce. There are some really subtle red/violet pigments that I collected from one particular river valley. I’d love to find more of them.
I really love the primal connection, here, to sourcing my own ochre. In the image above, the two pigments at the bottom (green-grey, and umber) were used for the toning of my panel, and initial drawing, in assignment 2 (which I’m working on in parallel). The grey has very low tinting strength, and the brown could use more grinding.
Levigation? Levitation.
Sublimation to sublime.
red becomes redder,
deep becomes deeper.
Through water:
refined.
A silly little poem that came to mind as I was filtering the pigments.
Bibliography
1 Oil Paints Artists Materials – How to Make Your Own Oil Paint Shop Artist Oils (s.d.) At: https://www.naturalpigments.com/artist-materials/tutorial-how-make-paint/ (Accessed 13/08/2022).