It’s been a while since I’ve ground a tube of oil paint! I decided to go for the gold-the garden gold pigment, which was dug from the ground at the NCC East 40. (See the 5/11/22 post for what this pigment looked like when I dried it into a powder.) Eventually I’ll also make tubes of other pigments I’m making, but the garden gold is so hyper local to where I’m working, this was one color I know I waned for sure. 

I started by just using a palette knife to mix refined linseed oil with the pigment to make a paste. Commerical paints generally have more that just pigment and oil, things like fillers and conditioners to change the properties of individual pigments, so that one color “feels” the same as the next. When you make your own paints, you get to know each pigment in an intimate way, each little property and quirk. If you look close at the photo below, you’ll see there are dry clumps of pigment, despite my mixing with the palette knife. That’s why, even though the garden gold has a nice fine particle size, I need to use the glass muller; to get each particle of pigment dispersed into the oil. It’s a slow process doing it the old school way like this with a muller. I’d want a grinding mill if I were doing any quantity, but I’m not after quantity. I’m after a connection with every material that I’m working with.

While mulling, in addition to the swirling lateral motion, you need to rock the muller a teeny bit vertically, one side down the other up then rock the other way. Without the rocking,  it creates a kind of suction to where the muller gets stuck to the glass! When done, the finished paint is glassy smooth; above right you can see me scraping the finished paint off the glass. If you take the Community Education paint making workshop this fall, you’ll get to try your own hand at it. 

I bought empty tubes; they have an open end at the back. The table I was working on had a nice bounce; this helped me jog the paint from the open end of the tube down towards the cap. (I've got video of this, but it isn't edited down to size yet.) The final step is to crimp the open end closed with a pliers. And then, the label. I couldn’t resist painting out some of the color from the tube, and putting on a label.

I can blame my dear friend Maria Kittler for getting me hooked on natural dyeing. She signed us up for a workshop at Edge of the Woods nursery, and then planted a dye garden for me in her back yard! With only a 4’ x 4’ raised bed, we knew we had to be strategic, and only plant the absolute best dye plants. Research showed that Woad (blue) madder (red) and Weld (yellow) were the absolute triple crown of permanent dye plants.  They were used from antiquity and extensively in the middle ages etc. For example the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters in NYC featured fiber dyed from all three (woad, madder & weld); roughly 600 years later, the woad in particular has held its color amazingly well. There are countless examples I could have given going back to ancient Egypt, but many of us are familiar with the Unicorn Tapestries so I decided to use them as an example.

Woad is a biennial-supposedly. Also supposedly, its best harvested to dye with in the first year and flowers in the second year. Yes, supposedly. I got much better woad dye results for some reason (there could be many reasons) from plants that were in full bloom. In the photo above left, you can see I stripped off the leaves for the dye pot. As for it being a biennial, I would swear there are woad plants in Marla’s garden that just didn’t die in winter and have lasted 4 years. On literally the first day of the residency, I pulled many a weed, and planted some seeds Marla had saved from a previous year. I asked Marla to let her plants go to seed so I could harvest the seeds to plant out at the East 40. It’s amazing how well the woad complied with my request! The madder has kind of choked out the woad, so that only maybe 25% of the 4’ x 4’ plot is woad at this point.

Woad loves growing back after getting cut right down to the ground. It will do that over and over the same year, it’s almost a year-round green vigorous grower in this climate. So I cut down all the woad in her bed, (photo above left shows it lying on the grass after I harvested it) and then plucked all the leaves for dye material and all the seeds for planting, photo above right.

Even though I’m generally a failure at growing anything from seed, even that little bit of woad I sowed the first day has provided some plants. I call them my woad babies, and have been tucking them in to bed each night. Seriously though, I have been getting rid of all the weeds around them and watering them as needed. Today I generously seeded around the woad babies, and on the other side of the bed where I didn’t have plants yet. The hope is, that when I do the dye workshop in September, that the class will get to help me pick the woad, and that we can do a nice big dye pot with it. The active ingredient, so to speak in woad is indigotin, the same as in indigo. Admittedly woad has less indigotin than indigo, but as it was what my ancestors used and grows well in this climate, it has somehow captured my imagination. Also, I got some delicate bright blues from it that so far I have not been able to get with indigo, which does not like this climate. So there. Go woad!

The first pastels I made-from the “Garden Gold” clay dug from the NCC East 40 (photo of this in 5/11/22 post “Back to Earth Pigment”), turned out great. I was not at all prepared for the spectacular failure of the next pastels I attempted to make. If you look at my April 2022 blog post “Don’t Jump in this lake” you will see how I made my first lake pigments. I attempted to make pastels using those lake pigments. They looked great after I made them. Then I came back the next day, to find the pastels had self-destructed; one looked like it had exploded, there were shards and powder all around what had been a well-formed pastel stick just the day before. 

As with other paints, the pigment is what gives the color. For pastels (also watercolor and gouache paints) the binding material is gum arabic, which is resin from the acacia tree. I had used only drops of the gum arabic in the garden gold pastels. I learned the hard way that the amount of gum arabic binder needed to make a usable pastel varies wildly. I suspected the exploding pastel didn’t have enough binder (the gum arabic) and possibly also not enough glycerine. I took the exploded bits and pieces, ground them up, then mixed in a more significant amount of gum arabic and glycerine. One thing I had read is that the glycerine should be proportioned to half of the amount of gum arabic. Glycerine is a natural product that improves the consistency of the pastels, and also has an antimicrobial property. It’s often sold as a moisturizer for skin and is totally non-toxic. I’ve also read that honey can be substituted for the glycerine.

The next day, the re-ground pastels had not self-exploded. But when I picked them up and tried to scribble with them a bit, the pastels broke into bits. I had to conclude I was on the right track-the pastels didn’t self-explode. But when used, they crumbled. So once again, I re-ground them adding even more gum arabic and glycerin. The next day, they were not dry enough to use. Interesting-I had read that pastels took several days to dry, but in my previous attempts, they had dried overnight. I took the fact that they took longer to dry as a clue I was on the right track with adding additional binder (gum arabic). I’m happy to report that three was a charm; the pastels held together well enough to use. Sort of. 


There is such a thing as too much binder-in this case, gum arabic. Too much binder, and the pastels were too hard, the marks made with them thin, not a mice amount of color but a kind of thin lime. I took paintbrush, dipped it in water and scrubbed at the scratchy, too-hard (too much binder) pastel marks, and the pigment dispersed easily into a nice “wash” of color. The nice thing is, with all my bungling about, I’m not wasting anything. Even my “failures” result in something I can still use.

So far I have not been able to make a satisfactory pastel from a rock pigment. More binder or more glycerin or honey perhaps? 

I looked at the price tag of the gum arabic I have been using; it said Pearl Paint, and the price was three dollars something. Ooops. Not only has Pearl paint been closed for about a decade, but gum arabic goes for at least 3 times what was on that price tag. I’ve been using probably 20 year old gum arabic. Maybe that’s an issue-off to the art supply store for me. Once I try some fresh gum arabic I’ll post my results.

Yes, you can make paint out of rocks. I’ll admit it takes a bit of effort, but there is something so exciting about picking up a rock, and discovering if it will make a good color-or not. The first magical thing about this is that a rock can look like one color when it’s solid, and another color when it’s pulverized into a powder to make pigment. Pigment is what gives paint its color. If you use oil for example, the oil is the same color no matter what color of paint you make; the oil is the binding material, and the pigment is what gives it the color. So getting back to the magic part-a pink rock gave me orange paint, a grey rock gave me green paint, and yes, a yellow ochre colored rock gave me yellow ochre color. But then one super bright orange rock gave me literally no color. I can’t explain it, I need to talk to a geologist. 

June 1 I began a 10-week artist residency on NCC’s East 40. I had every intention of blogging almost eery day, but here I am with so much going on it was hard to figure out where to start. So I’ll start with the East 40 itself. I’m not a selfie person, but the first day of the residency the weather was so glorious, and I wanted something to post about the residency so I broke down and did one. 
The East 40 is literally 40 acres on the East end of the Northampton Community College campus. It’s still off the grid-solar panels and propane tanks for power, rain catchment for water and um, a composting toilet. It’s part community garden, part nature preserve, part outdoor classroom, part pottery studio and part anything you can dream up-including an artist residency. Last year was the pilot year for the residency, thanks to professor Rachael Gorchov. I contacted her earlier in the year, she put me in touch with Kelly Allen who is in charge of the East 40 and he plugged me in to many resources at the college. This residency is still in its infancy, but I’m honored to be one of the pioneers, so to speak. The “product” of this residency won’t just be my artwork, but instructional materials that can be used by any NCC faculty and a community education class in natural dye and art materials. 
On day one, Kelly root-tilled a plot near the ceramics shed that is my home base so to speak for the residency so I could grow dye plants, woad in particular. I spent all day in the sun (with 100+ sun block on) pulling weeds out of the bed he just tilled. I only had time to plant half the bed with woad seeds. It’s been fun to watch the woad sprout and grow along with the residency. Yesterday I spent hours again pulling weeds, as I will seed most of the rest of the bed today.
So why am I planting woad for an artist residency, you may be wondering. Woad is one of the oldest and most color-fast blue dye. And it wasn’t just a dye-it was also used as a pigment, and I intend to use it both to dye fiber and to attempt to make a pigment. Pigments the solid, inert, and color-fast material that gives paint its color. So if I make a pigment, I can add oil for oil paint-or egg for egg tempera, gum arabic and other ingredients for pastel, gouache, watercolor etc. Of course, I’m going to use the art supplies once I make enough of them. I’ve done a whole lot more than plant woad so far, but this is enough for one post.