Pigments Revealed International

Recently has been teaching the production of extracting lapis lazuli pigment (lazurite) from its stone. David Cranswick is an artist & tutor of traditional painting methods and cosmology, he has a PhD in traditional art.

The group of attendees (including our recent Pigments Talk speaker !) have been learning to make Lapis Pigment to the Fra Angelico putty method outlined by Cennino Cennini in his book ‘The Craftsman’s Hsndbook’.

He says about day two of his workshop on the Cowdray Estate in West Sussex, U.K:

‘Day two of lapis workshop. Washing and refining the lapis powder, then making the putty into which the blue is kneaded, out of which only she can escape, leaving all the impurities imprisoned within the resinous wax material. Lapis blue is so ethereally present, it defies naming or labels and points to the profound non-existence of existence.’

Quote & images from ’s Instagram.

-painting .com

Lapis Lazuli has long been prized for its rich colour as a mineral pigment and also as a precious gem.

The earliest examples of Lapis pigment are in the (destroyed/damaged) cave paintings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan dating back to the 5th - 7th Centuries AD. Research on the Giant Buddha statues and Buddhist paintings have also shown that they are amongst the world’s oldest examples of oil paint.

“With the exception of one copper-based blue pigment, most blue pigments used in Bamiyan were made from lazurite ((Na,Ca)8(AlSiO4)6(SO4,S,Cl,OH)2), a pigment extracted from natural lapis lazuli.” (Taniguchi & Cotte 2022: 59)

According to Akira Miyaji, Japanese art historian, the ceiling of the Buddha’s shrine at the Eastern Giant Buddha was once covered with a blue lapis lazuli background and numerous illustrations such as winged deities, a Buddha and birds.

Many paintings in Bamiyan were polychromatic and multilayered, made from various minerals and ingredients including lapis lazuli, azurite, cinnabar/vermillion, yellow and red ochre, and gypsum to name a few. Cow milk casein and horse glue were identified as being used as sizing agents, and cow skin glue or drying oil (poppyseed/walnuts/perilla oils) a binding materials.  

Paintings also used layering to create different colour variations of the pigments, for example roughly crushed lapis lazuli was sometimes used on a carbon black layer to darken the colour.

Images:
1-5: examples of paintings with blue pigments from various sites and caves in Bamiyan. From Taniguchi & Cotte 2022
6-7: polarized light microscopy (PLM) photos of pigment layers with blue pigment. Fom Taniguchi & Cotte 2022.
8: Bamiyan Valley. UNESCO, Graciela Gonzalez Briggs
9: Bamiyan Buddha (before destruction in 2001). Wikipedia

Sources and further reading:
-Taniguchi, Y. & Cotte, M. 2022. The wall paintings of Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
-Taniguchi et al. 2002. Organic Materials Used for Giant Buddhas and Wall Paintings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Applied Sciences 12(19), 9476
-KhanAcademy.org
- whc.UNESCO.org




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You don't want to miss this Pigments Talk!!

Join artist, writer, maker and forager Caroline Ross ⭐🌿🧡 in conversation with artist and pigment maker Lucy Mayes 💥💚🍂

'See With The Body Eye: Pigment, Embodiment, and Regrowing a Living Culture'

20th July, 12pm Pacific / 8pm GMT

REGISTRATION LINK on our website: https://www.pigmentsrevealed.com/upcoming-events-calendar

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth, UK. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published June 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice.

Drawing on experiences of a lifetime in arts and craft, 25 years in T’ai Chi, and the last decade working publicly with and writing about earth arts, Caroline will be talking about how we can weave richer life ways and art practices that allow the whole of us to show up in all our diversity, brilliance and even our messed-upness. In a time of unravelling, how can we develop our love of colour and earth into a truly generative practice, one that will sustain us and others through challenging times?

Make sure to register for our upcoming Pigments Talk with artist, writer, maker and forager Caroline Ross! ⭐🌿🧡

'See With The Body Eye: Pigment, Embodiment, and Regrowing a Living Culture'

20th July, 12pm Pacific / 8pm GMT

REGISTRATION LINK on our website: https://www.pigmentsrevealed.com/upcoming-events-calendar

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth, UK. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published June 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice.


Drawing on experiences of a lifetime in arts and craft, 25 years in T’ai Chi, and the last decade working publicly with and writing about earth arts, Caroline will be talking about how we can weave richer life ways and art practices that allow the whole of us to show up in all our diversity, brilliance and even our messed-upness. In a time of unravelling, how can we develop our love of colour and earth into a truly generative practice, one that will sustain us and others through challenging times?

We are featuring Lapis Lazuli pigment this month and here is a brilliant opportunity to learn how to process the pigment from Dr David Cranswick
this July in England, U.K.
Five day lapis lazuli workshop at Cowdray Castle. The transformation of rock into pure pigment. 22nd - 26th July 2024. Midhurst, West Sussex, UK

-painting .com

Did you know synthetic ultramarine was used as a laundry whitener?

When this became readily available to Indigenous Australians after the British colonial invasion it was adopted as a pigment – used alongside natural Earth and charcoal paints to produce rock art and designs on material culture (shields, belts etc.). Some contemporary Australian artists continue to use this Reckitt’s Blue in their practice today!

Images: 
1 Reckitts blue on Far North Queensland (Australia) rainforest shields, Private Collection. https://medium.com//blue-ochre-7b058cc64ff7. naturalpigment.com
2. Reckitts blue. Photo by Patricia Dobrez
3. Reckitts blue Aboriginal Rock Art from Kakadu National Park, Australia https://medium.com//blue-ochre-7b058cc64ff7 
4. The Blue Paintings created by Nayombolmi. Photo by Andrea Jalandoni
5. Blue hand stencils in Mutawintji National Park, Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutawintji_National_Park
6. D. Harding (Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal artist) creating Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue 2017, specially commissioned for the Australian art collection at GOMA

Text Dr Jillian Huntley

✨See With The Body Eye: Pigment, Embodiment, and Regrowing a Living Culture✨

Pigments Talk with Caroline Ross!


20th July, 12pm Pacific / 8pm GMT

REGISTRATION LINK on our website: https://www.pigmentsrevealed.com/upcoming-events-calendar

In the tactile desert of contemporary life, with its ubiquitous frictionless glass surfaces and barely pixel-deep ways of relating, earth pigments and the preparation of foraged, traditional and archaic art materials can offer us an authentic way back to the real.

Drawing on experiences of a lifetime in arts and craft, 25 years in T’ai Chi, and the last decade working publicly with and writing about earth arts, Caroline will be talking about how we can weave richer life ways and art practices that allow the whole of us to show up in all our diversity, brilliance and even our messed-upness. In a time of unravelling, how can we develop our love of colour and earth into a truly generative practice, one that will sustain us and others through challenging times?

Looking at work by Vanessa Oliveira Machado, Dougald Hine, The Dark Mountain Project and Taoist Classics, she’ll mull over a pigment practice that welcomes change, honours our ancestors and seeks to rebalance what has gone out of kilter.

Join Caroline in conversation with her friend and colleague Lucy Mayes!

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth, UK. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published June 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice.

We will be sharing pigment stories and processing techniques relating to Lapis Lazuli for this month’s Pigment of the Month. The mineral lazurite is the blue colorant in Lapis Lazuli stone. It was synthesised in 1826 by French chemist Jean-Baptist’s Guimet by heating kaolin, sodium carbonate and sulphur (with rosin) in a kiln to create a material chemically identical to lazurite.

Lucy Mayes of created a series of synthetic ultramarine pigment batches from using Cornish kaolin as the base for the pigment, and here are some of her pigments. Commissioned by for these processes and materials will be on display at Royal Cornwall Museum from mid July.

She’ll be sharing more about her specific recipes later on this month, but for now enjoy some raw ultramarine pigment cakes.

This July we'll be exploring the vivid blues of Lapis Lazuli and ultramarine!

Lapis Lazuli features in ancient times in legend and folklore, spiritual life and art. We'll be exploring these narratives this month, as well as the science and geology of lapis lazuli and ultramarines, and share current art practices involving these stunning blue pigments.

We'd love to hear about your experiences, interesting facts, research and art with lapis and ultramarine. Please share with us and tag us so that we can share with the PRI community!

Images: geologyscience.com; Pakistan lapis lazuli - dalmolinicone.it

From the 17th century in Europe, green earths were a popular pigment among early landscape paintings.

Terre Verte was traditionally used as an underpainting color for tonal values and became useful for this genre to capture the earthy layers, and then mixed with the use of other pigments used to tint and glaze.

Image: Jan Willemsz Lapp (fl c 1605–1663), Italianate Landscape with Shepherds (date not known), oil on canvas, 58.9 x 68.2 cm
Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, The Hague, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

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We’re looking forward to tomorrow’s Pigments Talk with and there’s still time to sign up for this free online session. (Link in bio) 💥

Want to know more about this exquisite blue pigment featured in this post? Jeremy’s beautiful blue verditer pigment is handmade and his pigment making processes will be spoken about at the talk.

Repost from
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The finished Blue Verditer, after about 2 weeks of digestion of Copper Nitrate and Chalk the slow reaction takes place and this beautiful blue is formed. I can see how the French struggled for many years to work out how the English made this blue, as there are so many little nuances and factors that need to be just right in order to obtain a blue shade.

Wow!
These impressive exposures of green rock are a multitude of reworked layers of volcanic ash. The rich green color of the claystone was caused by chemical weathering of celadonite. Less than 2% of celadonite is required to produce the green coloration of the claystone at Sheep Rock, Turtle Cove and Blue Basin at John Day.

The John Day Fossil Bed formations (a National Monument) in Oregon, US, represent the longest geological record from about 33 million to 7 million years ago, with the Blue Basin formation dated to 30 to 29 million years ago through radiocarbon dating fossils present in the claystone.

Images
1 John Day formation
2 +3 Turtle Cove
credits Erwan Gardan, Tugade Ancheta, Dreamstime

While celadonite and glauconite are the sources for of green earth pigments there are many other interesting green minerals that have recently begun to be used as pigments.

Because most are quite new on the market (so new that you can’t even purchase epidote watercolor or oil paints yet, but Kremer sells the pigment), there is no real information about their use yet! Serpentine, green apatite, fuschite, zoisite and jadeite have been available for a few years and add important greens to the palette, and are great for mixing with other colors. If you have used either epidote or serpentine, let us know your experiences with them!  

Pictured here are Aegirine mineral and pigment
(1-2), and Epidote mineral and pigment
(3-4)
Images sourced from and materials available for purchase at !

What Green Earth adjacent colors are you working with? Serpentines? Chlorites? We would love to hear your stories!

Text by .heying

fuschite

Our Pigment of the Month is green earth. Pigments known as green earth can be made from a multitude of different minerals from locations all over the world. Like the term ‘ochre’, ‘green earth’ can be used widely and this month we’ll be featuring specific green earth minerals like glauconite & celadonite in our posts. The following is from an online article about how glauconite’s behavior poses a “significant risk” to offshore wind projects (in the Atlantic Ocean) — and could make it harder to minimize potential effects on the environment and fishing. Following the various properties & applications particular pigments can have can lead you to some surprising places..

Glauconite can form over tens of thousands of years. The older it is, the darker it is — almost black; younger glauconite ranges in hues from a light jade green to greenish beige. It’s formed in part from f***l pellets and tiny marine organisms, but “it’s not all poop,” said marine geologist Kenneth Miller.

Glauconite can be around 70 million years old (or younger), yet researchers are finding some of it in seafloor strata that are less than 2.5 million years old. Miller says it could have been transported by water from glauconite beds on land. 

When glauconite is manipulated — in offshore wind construction, that would happen during foundation installation — it starts to crush, changing from sand-like to clay-like. 

“From a geotechnical perspective, that is like night and day,” said Zachary Westgate, associate professor of civil engineering at UMass Amherst and a researcher on the industry-funded glauconite project. Getting the monopiles into the seabed is key to installing wind turbines with fixed foundations, so if pile refusal occurs, it could present an added challenge.

For further information check out the article here:

https://newbedfordlight.org/a-tricky-sticky-mineral-thats-challenging-offshore-wind-developers/

Up next for our Pigments Talk series is: “Chromatic Revival” with Jeremy Parker of The Alchemical Arts

💥Saturday June 22, 12pm Pacific Daylight time💥

Founder, director and head alchemist of The Alchemical Arts, Jeremy is our guest speaker for the Pigments Talk this month. Join us as he shares his experiences and experiments with both historic and contemporary methods of pigment production. By bringing together the old and the new, the known and the unknown, I hope to cultivate a rich landscape of ideas and processes that can help the never ending pursuit of colour production.He will highlight the wealth of knowledge that can be revealed through exploring methods of the past along with experimentation to produce pigments.

Images:
1. Jeremy grinding madder pigment with a muller and slab
2. Madder pigment drying in a filter paper
3. Some of Jeremy’s equipment he uses to make paint

Green earth pigments along with malachite and verdigris are among the oldest green pigments used.

At least two thousand years ago, green earth pigment was commonly used in ancient times in Roman frescos, with the first written mention found in an Italian source in the 1st century BCE.

Green earth pigments can be traced far into the Medieval and Renaissance periods across Europe due to the rich regional deposits of Terre Verte found in the Italian Peninsula. The pigments have been used extensively in paintings due to their stability and non-reactive qualities. They were also an inexpensive substitute for malachite.

Image: Roman wall painting fragment, Vine with grapes and a flowing creeper, 1st century CE, The Metropolitan Museum, Accession Number: 94.4.391


Thanks for sharing

Jeremy Parker of The Alchemical Arts is our guest speaker on Pigments Talk this month.

*Chromatic Revival*

Join us as he shares his investigations and experiments with traditional alchemical practices and making pigments!

Saturday 22 June at 12pm PDT / 7pm GMT
(5am, 23 June AEST, Australia)

Register now. Link in bio or go to https://www.pigmentsrevealed.com/upcoming-events-calendar

Talk info:
The history of colour making and the production of artists pigments is rich and diverse landscape, spanning all cultures and time periods throughout the entire human endeavour. The disciplines of Alchemy, Art and Science have all been deeply involved in this long history of colour production. A key feature of all three of these disciplines is the extensive use of experimentation. Experimentation leads to new developments, which in turn creates new ideas, processes and ultimately new tried and true methods of colour production.
 
Jeremy will explore the relationship with experimentation in the pursuit of the production of pigments. He will discuss blind experimentation, and other experimental techniques, considering historic and current contemporary methods of pigment production .

Find out more about Jeremy's work and passion https://www.thealchemicalarts.com https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAlchemicalArts

Jeremy, based in Ballarat, Australia, is an artist, traditional pigment maker, YouTube presenter and passionate experimenter. After completing his arts education and being dissatisfied with the much of the contemporary art world he began exploring historic painting techniques. This exploration led him to traditional 16th century oil paint making, which in turn lead to classical egg tempera iconography.

Green Earth is a pigment we all know and love – translucent greens ranging from blue to gray to gold to brown, adding coolness and subtlety to our palette. What minerals do we have to thank for these gorgeous pigments?!

Celadonite and Glauconite are the primary mineral sources of Green Earth pigment, both of which are iron silicate minerals with potassium and other elements. While chemically similar, celadonite forms through volcanic processes and glauconite forms through sedimentary processes.

Unsure about which mineral you found? If you are in a region with no history of volcanic activity, it’s fair to say it’s a glauconite!

Text & Images of Celadonite (1) and Glauconite (2) from .heying and her Material Archive of Natural & Historic materials

The transmutation of materials into pigments through ancient alchemical will be explored by founder, paint-maker and head alchemist Jeremy Parker of in this month’s Pigments Talk.

When: June 22, 12pm PDT - sign up link in bio!

Head alchemist and pigment-maker at The Alchemical Arts, Jeremy says, “The development of my colour making practice has been one filled with a never ending series of mistakes, failures and happy accidents. The experience of pure experimentation is a rich and rewarding process that is always a fine balance of frustration and discovery.”

Chromatic Revival
 
The history of colour making and the production of artists pigments is rich and diverse landscape, spanning all cultures and time periods throughout the entire human endeavour. The disciplines of Alchemy, Art and Science have all been deeply involved in this long history of colour production. A key feature of all three of these disciplines is the extensive use of experimentation. Experimentation leads to new developments, which in turn creates new ideas, processes and ultimately new tried and true methods of colour production.
 
This talk seeks to explore Jeremy’s relationship with experimentation in the pursuit of the production of pigments. He will exam the differences between blind experimentation and more focused work based off known methods. He will look at the differences between historic methods of pigment production vs more current contemporary methods. Jeremy hopes to highlight the wealth of knowledge that can be garnered through exploring the methods of the past, but also how there is still an extensive amount of experimentation and development that can be achieved.
 
Jeremy is an artist, traditional pigment maker, YouTube presenter and passionate experimenter. After completing his arts education and being dissatisfied with the much of the contemporary art world he began exploring historic painting techniques. This exploration led him to traditional 16th century oil paint making, which in turn lead to classical egg tempera iconography.

This June we are celebrating Green Earth!

💚 Celadonite, Glauconite, Terra Verte, Sankir...and other forms of iron and potassium-rich phyllosilicates or sheet silicates 💚

From uses as undertone skin paints in Russian iconography or in modern cosmetic skin masks. From the durability and self-sealing properties of green earth to help contain nuclear waste to its healing properties on open skin wounds - there's a lot to these pigments to explore.

We’d love to hear about your experiences, interesting facts, research and art with green earth pigments! Please share with us and tag us so that we can share with the PRI community.

Inspired by - you all need to read Book of Earth

Images:
1 Beautiful green earths from archive
2 marshy stilbite with celadonite inclusions
3 ground glauconite
4 celadonite .arts
5 with celadonite from

To tie up our posts about indigo blue for this month’s pigment of the month series we have one more post woven together for us by Eva-Maria Spampinato

The photos for this post capture the alchemical reaction when the mix of sepiolite and indigo are stirred continuously on a safe surface of heat - important to use a wooden spoon & stainless steal vessel, this keeps the chemical reaction stable to make Maya Blue. You can see the color change from light blue, to darker, to purple then back to a rich indigo blue. There is a spark of red that happens marking the chemical reaction indicating the bonds between the sepiolite and indigo has been made. 

Eva-Maria works with and the following summary of maya blue comes from Slow Fiber Studios website where they sell the purest grades of indigo and Mayan blue pigment kits.

“Maya blue pigment is a plant-based pigment used historically for wall cave painting by the Mayans, Romans, and Chinese. Called a “pre-Columbian nanotechnology,” Maya blue (azul maya) is a unique bright azure pigment famously manufactured by ancient Mesoamericans. Modern day Maya blue is made by mixing indigo powder with absorbent clay and then heating the mixture to reach the desired shade.”

Another organisation Eva-Maria collaborated with is Stony Creek Colors on “North America Indigo Research Project” in 2017-2020. SCC last year was awarded most sustainable business as Miliano Fashion Week for 2023.

About Stony Creek Colors:
“Our indigo is sourced from Stony Creek Colors in Tennessee. Sarah Bellos, CEO and founder of Stony Creek Colors, is working to shape a brighter future for indigo and other natural dyes at a commercial level in the United States. SCC is working to turn old to***co farms into indigo farms to create a sustainable and reliably high quality local source of fresh indigo products in America.’’

A big thank you to Eva-Maria for sharing these indigo craftspeople with us, we hope you’ll spend some time getting to know them too!

Here is a lovely repost from about indigo ink and eggshell additive (see below). Thank you to everyone for sending in your posts on your indigo experiments fir this months Pigment of the Month.
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PBI Indigo eggshell ink. From the eggshell dipped in an Indigo vat at , I made ink.

Because of the eggshell, it became opaque like gouache. It was truly magical to see the drying process. D.V. Thompson, a renowned art historian, mentions in his book the recipes for tinted eggshells; blues from berries and indigo, which have been used in the14th to 15th centuries. This is nothing new at all!

At PBI, we explored making eggshell white, egg tempera and glair(egg white) from the eggs of the chickens. Thank you Ox-bow and PBI, all the co-directors, instructors, staff, and everyone involved. I will keep this ink as a sweet memory from the past 2 weeks!

is celebrating Indigo this month as their “pigment of the month”. Please check their posts for very interesting stories around Indigo!