Soy Milk as a Mordant

I have learnt a lot about the use of soy milk as a fixative and as a mordant during my study of earth pigments. Primarily to use soy you must use fresh soy milk that has been made that day from beans soaked overnight and blended with water prior to use.

I had tried soy milk as a mordant in earlier eco dying attempts but never been very successful. That was because I tried to use off the shelf store bought soy milk. So i decided to give this ago.

The example above was made using scoured cotton and soaking the cotton in fresh soy milk for about 30 minutes before making a bundle and steaming it. I omitted to give this fabric a tannin bath before using it so the liquidamabar leaves have not printed well but the maple, cotinus and forest tulip leaves have all transferred successfully. The cotinus leaves were fresh but the others were taken out of my freezer and rehydrated before use. I think a tannin dip would have further enhanced all the prints.

Earth Pigments on Textured Grounds

This is an interesting concept and something I would like to try more of. The texture above was made from some old concrete at the back of my house. My house was built on the foundations of an old butter factory so some of the concrete is old and stony.

I presized some scoured linen with fresh soy and lay this on the concrete. Then I painted it with a soy pig paint made from soy milk and yellow ochre earth pigment and left the cloth to dry in situ. The weather was quite damp so it took ages to dry but the lovely pattern on the cloth was worth the wait

I think I would make a stronger mix in the future to enhance the pattern. This could be achieved using wood or cobblestones on rough concrete to achieve a different texture.

A subtle print with Soypig

The interesting thing with this method of working is that the soy milk “size” impregnates the fabric and will fix the pigments in the cloth at the painting stage. It does require 4 weeks to cure so that the fixation is complete. The pigments in the soypig paint drops through the top surface of the fabric to be revealed on the underneath of the cloth so when the fabric is dry the reveal is often a surprise.

I am working on a heavy weight plastic sheet so I can move the painted fabric around while I wait for it to dry without disturbing the sinking pigments. This piece is on white linen that has been scoured by washing in the washing machine on a 60 ° wash with 2 tablespoons soda ash and a teaspoon of Fairy dishwash (neutral soap). Scouring removes any finishes or starch etc from the cloth that might interfere with the natural process.

Claire Benn calls the process of painting soy milk on the fabric “sizing with soy”. I worked on damp soy cloth and this has to be done the same day as the soy milk is made (see previous post). I kept the sized cloths in a zip lock bag in the fridge while waiting to use them Or the sized pieces can be dried and put aside for use at a later date. I haven’t had much joy with working on the dry cloths so I will spritz the fabrics with water to dampen them before I use them (paint them) in the future.

I mixed 1 teaspoon to 100ml of soy milk to make my soy paint. The soy milk is added gradually to the pigment so as to avoid lumps or clumping. This piece used the pigment sourced from the bottom of my garden. I placed some lengths of end thread from the linen under the fabric (on top of the plastic) - Claire calls these “thieves” and then using a cut back chip brush I painted the soy pig paint across the fabric.

As i am primarily a representational artist, this way of working forces me into abstraction and I was delighted with the result. I am calling this piece “Turbulence”. To fix the soy and pigment permanently on the cloth there is a four week “curing time”. And then stitch can be added to enhance the cloth. This is the stage I am at now with this piece.

This final image shows the side I painted with the soy pig. You can see the shape of the thieves vaguely on this tip side but it is quite darker and different to the underside where the soy pig paint has dropped down through the fabric.

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