After a flood is an excellent time to look for my natural art supplies.
On my way home from the office yesterday, I saw the roots of an Osage tree. Of course, I had to stop, and then I couldn’t leave without picking up at least a few rocks.
I use the Osage root bark and rocks from the creek to make my paints.
In this video, I’m just looking, mostly, because I don’t have my foraging bag with me. But I’ll show you the part I use from the roots of the tree, and scratch a few rocks to show you the colors they make 🙂
Natural Art Supplies
The rocks I find here on our land and in the nearby creeks is where most of the colors come from for my paintings.
The first thing I saw was the bright orange bark on the roots of a washed up Osage tree. Later you’ll see halfway through the video, I found a nice yellow rock alongside our driveway.
This one, in particular, isn’t easy to find on demand. Most of them have more orange to them, and I needed one that was more yellow.
I’ve been supplying pigment to Wallace Seymour in the UK, and they take them and make oil paints or watercolor kits from them. The paints they ship to Soho Art Materials in NYC. So these beautiful pigments are finding their way around the world!
So, some of that yellow rock will be for my own natural art supplies, and some will go into Wallace Seymour’s next order if they need more pigment from me later.
A Little About My Paint-making Process
Since my paints are handmade and (mostly) locally foraged, I have to make sure I have the colors I need before I begin a project. If it’s a plant pigment, then I’ll need to harvest the plant and process it to make the pigment. The only plant sources I use at this time are thyme, and the root bark of Osage trees. The rest comes from foraged rocks, soot, bone, or purchased lapis and titanium dioxide powder.
Here’s a blog post I made earlier about making oil paints:
So, if it’s a rock, then I’ll break it to smaller pieces, then crush it as finely as I can. The crushed rock is the raw pigment. After that I put the powder into a jar and fill the jar with water. Depending on the source rock, I’ll either pour off the colored water into another jar to let it settle, or pour the rinse water out and keep the sediment for the paint. After the water clarifies and the pigment has settled, then I pour off the clear water and let the sediment dry. That is what I’ll make the paint from.
When it comes to plants, there’s more chemistry involved. I’ll make what is called a ‘lake’ pigment. Here’s a post that gives more information on that process.
I hope you love this earthy palette of color as much as I do! Thanks for reading ~ Madison