Going for the gold-the garden gold

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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.