Earth Pigments

It seems articles about earth pigments and creating your own art materials are everywhere - or is that just because I have become aware of them. I do note I have in my library a couple of books like “Organic Artist (Nick Neddo) and “The Organic Painter (Carne Griffith) so it has obviously been at the back of my radar for a while.

So when Fibre Art Take 2 offered a course with Claire Benn (UK) called out of this earth and focused on the concepts of soy milk and earth pigments (either hand made or sourced from eco suppliers) I was ready for the challenge. And what a challenge it has become. Claire is well known for her surface design work with fibre reactive dyes but over the past few years she has worked almost exclusively with soy milk and pigments in abstracted compositions. She is a great teacher with so much encouragement to just try things and anyone wanting to learn more about this process - rather than just my achievements through the next few blogs - would be rewarded with enrolling for the next intake with Fibre Arts Take Two.

It has been an interesting journey for me as I am primarily a representational artist and struggle with Creating abstract work that I am happy with. The unknown “reveals” in the soy pig process have helped me to look differently at my work

The earth pigments are locked in place with the protein within the soy milk. It is essential that fresh whole soy beans be soaked and then ground each day as the soy sours quickly without all the additives found in store bought soy milk. That was my first hurdle - finding whole soy beans (not split) to work with as the biosecurity standards make whole soy bean access a little difficult.

Back to my earth pigments. In the photo above I have taken some earth from down by the spring - this is the same earth I used for the dabu dying. I dried the soil and then ground it with a mortar and pestle. It was then sieved through a standard kitchen sieve. A second finer sieve was then used to reduce how fine the particles were. It should then have been mullered but mullers are quite expensive so I tried to grind my fine particles on a sheet of glass with a flat bottomed candlestick.

My final product was lighter than I anticipated but I was not disappointed with my result

Earth pigments are available in a whole range of colours from art supply stores but the prices vary quite a lot. I purchased a yellow ochre, a green and a black powdered pigment along with a sample set which enabled me to try pigment colours that I might want to use more of in the future.

Fnally I was ready to make my soy paint using one teaspoon of my pigment to 100ml of freshly prepared soy milk