Don't Jump in this Lake

In January whenI did my Madder (plant root) and Cochineal (bug that lives on prickly pear cactus) dye pots, I decided to take the plunge into lake pigments. I remember decades ago when I first got serious about painting, reading about lake pigments but I only began natural dyeing in 2018. And then it wasn’t until reading “The Art & Science of Natural Dyes” did I discover I could make a lake pigment out of the “exhaust” dye after dyeing fiber!  The alchemy of taking natural dye and converting it to a solid pigment was easier than I dared hope. I had both chemicals on the shelf already-and they are both on the shelves in your local grocery store. 

It starts with an acid, alum-used in making pickles, which is followed by the addition of the alkali washing soda, which you can find in the laundry aisle. It makes this lovely fizz, like the volcano you made in 6th grade science. Then the dye becomes a solid and settles to the bottom. Simple. Well, then you have to get rid of all the extra water. The idea is head-slapping simple. 

The laborious part is getting rid of the water. At first I just took a sauce pan (that does not get used for cooking anymore) and bailed out the now-clear water at the top, once the pigment settled to the bottom. Even that is slightly tricky to do without stirring up the sediment-the pigment-at the bottom. Then comes the giant coffee filter lining a metal mesh strainer, and taking the sludge left in the coffee filter after the water drips through, and putting it in jars. Even after that filtration, the pigment sludge just had too much water to make even water-based paints like watercolor. I spread out the sludge on a large plate of glass and let it dry. Et voila! What I scraped off the glass is a dried powder that can be used for any media-oil, egg tempera, watercolor, pastel, crayon etc.! 

I was hooked. Now I’m on a pigment quest, exploring what I can do the very, very old school way with making pigments and varied types of paint from those pigments.