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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Research and Art of Marion Forester 