The Seasonality of Pigments

Pigment making is something that can be done all year, but access to some of the materials for making pigments can be very seasonal.

Winter

Winter is a good time to make carbon black pigments. The cold temperatures make a fire in a fireplace or fire pit welcome. Many groceries stores carry nuts in the shell around Christmas time. If you wait until after Christmas, you can purchase almonds in the shell at a deep discount. The almond shells make a lovely blue-black when carbonized. To carbonize materials for pigment, put the material in a low oxygen container and put the container into the fire. This process works for almond shells, bone, ivory (mammoth ivory is legal), peach pits, grapevine, or hardwood.

Spring

Spring brings plant based pigments more into focus. This is the time to plant the dye plant seeds you purchased during the winter months. Most plants require that you wait until after the last frost so pay attention to the forecast and the planting expectations for your region. You may also be planting bulbs like saffron crocuses or perennial plants like columbine. Always be careful to avoid invasive plants for your region. These may include woad, weld, and buckthorn (shrub).

Later in the spring you can start to harvest flowers for green pigments. Blue iris petals and columbine petals make a lovely transparent green.

Summer

Summer adds more botanical pigment opportunities. Cornflowers and poppies will be ready for harvest and processing. Sometimes columbine will continue to flower during the summer. Blackberries can be used to create a reddish purple clothlet.

Late summer brings elderberries and buckthorn berries. Buckthorn berries will produce different colors at different times. When unripe, buckthorn berries will produce an orange tinted yellow. When harvested when fully ripe, buckthorn berries create a green pigment sometimes called sap green.

Feel free to experiment with various flowers. Although I have found no documentation for its use as a medieval pigment, I have used dandelion flowers to make a lake pigment. I have made purple pigment with red geranium flowers. Red roses produced a disappointing greenish brown.

You can also take advantage of the pleasant summer temperatures to work outside to do the things that I have learned not to do inside. At this point I am no longer allowed to do the following things inside according to my spouse due to noxious smells produced: make ink with vinegar and make garlic glair for gilding. Although we love the smell of garlic, when squeezing the juice from about 100 cloves of garlic, the vapors in the kitchen made our eyes water and became almost weapon grade. Same with simmering vinegar to make brazilwood or iron gall ink. Wine or beer used to make ink is tolerable inside, but vinegar should really be moved outside on a camp stove.

Messy processes like ink making or processing earth pigments can also be moved outside, but be careful of wind when processing earth pigments as the fine particles often make the most beautiful colors.

Fall

Fall brings botanical harvesting to a close and is the time to prepare for winter. Late summer or early fall are the time to divide irises and mulch perennials in preparation for winter.

Black is the Color

Recently I have been working on black pigments.  I have already posted about peach pit black and bone and ivory blacks.  I have added almond shell black and lamp black to the line up as well as tried bone black with pork rib bones which yielded some different results.  Later I will try turkey bones to make bone black after our Christmas dinner.

Turkey bones left over from Christmas dinner will become bone black pigment at some time.

To make lamp black pigment, I filled a lamp with linseed oil from an art store.  I then lit the lamp and positioned a heat resistant glass container above the flame and adjusted the flame to just lick the glass.  I had to keep adjusting the flame to make sure it was in the correct position because the wick would burn down quickly.  After a while, I turned off the flame and, when cool, removed the glass dish and scraped the soot with a palette knife.  When making paint with the lamp black, I added a bit of ox gall because the oily soot resists water.

My lamp black making set up

Soot scraped from the glass

Lamp black pigment

Almond shell black as well as lamp black was mentioned in Ceninni’s Il Libro Del Arte.  I made almond shell black the same way as bone black and ivory black, by putting the material into a closed container and putting it into the fire.  The carbonized material was then ground.

Almond shellls with delicious nuts removed and eaten.

Pipe fitting with caps containing material to carbonize. This one had rib bone.

Carbonized almond shell

I also used rib bones from my husbands BBQ dinner to make bone black.  The bones still had a significant amount of grease on them which caused flames to leak out of the pipe when carbonizing the bones.

Carbonized pork rib bones

All of this resulted in a variety of black pigments which I made into paint.

While the pigments looked identical to each other when ground, making them into paint brought out the differences in the black colors.  Ivory black was significantly more brown than the other black pigments which sound like what I have read about historical ivory black paints.  Bone black made with pork rib bones turned out very similar in a more dark brown than true black.

Almond shell black seemed a bit bluer than the rest of the pigments.

The darkest, truest black pigments were the bone black from chicken bones, charcoal that I had gathered from a campfire, peach pit, and lamp black.

 

*Fun little note:  As I was working on black pigments, the song lyric “Black is color of my true love’s hair” kept running through my head, hence the blog post title.