From: lva (lva@pamho.net)
Date: 10/02/01-08:45:26 AM Z
Richard Sullivan wrote:
> Ok, tell us more about how you heat, "burn", and process your
> pigments. Do you grind and settle out the rocky stuff like in the
> pigment book?
There are two ways of getting the stuff.
First the better and more dangerous one: You go to one of those pits
where companies dig for sand and gravel. You may have seen those,
they're almost everywhere. Try to find one where there the sand has a
yellowish color. There are usually fresh 'walls' (Sundays are good for
this) where you can see the layers of gravel, sand, clay etc. Every now
and then there's a very dark brown, almost black vein in one of these
almost vertical walls. That's where the stuff sits which we're after.
Then put on your helmet and have the cell phone switched on. These walls
do tend to collapse. It's not THAT dangerous if you know what you're
doing (I grew up near the Alps, so that helps).
The purest pigment is in those veins. The stones, gravel and pebbles
there are covered by a very thin layer of pigment. You can rub some of
it between your fingers. A minute later, when the pigment has dried, you
see the actual color of what you are going to mine.
I take those stones, gravel and pebbles and put them in a bag. Back at
the studio I put them in a bucket, add a good amount of water and decant
carefully 20 to 50 times depending on how fine I want the powder to be.
After the decanting I filter the broth through a very fine tea sieve (to
remove any organic particles). Then let the whole thing rest for a day.
By then the pigment has settled. I throw away the water and let the
thick pigment soup sit until it has dried.
Then grind some of it for a short time in a mortar with a pestle. That
grinding is not going to make the pigment particles smaller. Due to
careful decanting they are already smaller than they could ever get in a
mortar. But it turns the lumps into powder.
Then add some Bostick&Sullivan gum and dichromate and make a beautiful
print. :) (BTW, Richard, when is your staff going to send that parcel?
I'm running out of gum.)
The powder can also be burnt. I just put a piece of aluminum foil on a
stove (gas stoves work fine, the electric ones are also great but they
should have these round metal things that get hot). Heat it up to the
max and watch how your powder pigment changes in color. The pigment
turns black. When you remove it from the stove, you see the pigment turn
from black to its final color. It's one of my favorite pastimes these
days. How can something that's black while hot turn into such a
brilliant color when cooled down. It's great fun to watch that.
To make the burnt pigment even nicer, you can put it in a mortar, add
some water, grind it for a while and decant a few times. In this way you
get rid of the tiniest particles of clay that may have crept into that
vein of ore-rich stones.
Now to the second, safer, and in my opinion inferior method.
You go to one of those pits after a rainy day and find a puddle. There
is usually a lot of pigment that looks like ochre. You take that home
and process it more or less in the same way as described above. But most
of the time the pigment from these puddles is too much polluted by clay.
However, if you are only after a BURNT pigment, then this method is
great, less time consuming and you don't have to have your cell phone
with you. Also, you don't have to be so careful while decanting. The
garbage will disappear during decanting after the burning anyway.
You don't have to wait until the pigment has dried. Just smear the wet
stuff on aluminum foil, bake it on your stove, grind it with a bit of
water in a mortar and then decant several times very carefully. Now you
have some great burnt pigment, usually umber or a sienna or whatever the
chemical composition of the ore from that area is.
I have produced a burnt umber today that beats Schmincke's burnt umber
moist watercolor hands down.
> It does sound interesting. How on earth (pun!) did you
> get started doing this pigment thing in the first place?
Some time ago I've looked for Linel watercolor because Steven Livick
recommends it so highly in his book. But the stuff is hard to get, as
you know. I think you must hold a French passport to be eligible for
close contact with these tubes.
Anyway, I wrote texts on the net about Linel watercolor, and Katherine
Thayer used to get on my case (THANKS, Katherine!!!) because I mentioned
Linel to be one of the best brands for gum printers, or something to
that effect. I just quoted Livick.
But Katherine has studied what the "colormen" actually put in these
tubes and has realizewd that each one of these companies produces a few
good paints and a lot of lousy ones. No one company produces only good
ones.
So thanks to Katherine's crusade against pigment ignorance, I did my own
little research and started looking more carefully at the tubes where it
says in microscopically printed code what's inside that tube. Then I
read that fantastic book by Michael Wilcox who seems to have personally
tested thousands of watercolor paints. His comments are sometimes very
funny, especially the ones about the "ST.Petersburg" brand.
One of his comments really did it for me. He comments on a Burnt Sienna,
I think it was Winsor&Newton's. He says he feels sorry for all those
artists who think they're using a genuine burnt sienna while all they're
getting is a dreadful mix of synthethic pigments. That's when I started
looking for real and pure pigments. I found Dr Kremer in Germany, who,
BTW, told me he would love to answer all of the questions by members of
this list relating to pigments via his email which is
kremer-pigmente@t-online.de
Then one day I saw a dark vein in a layer of gravel when I drove around
in my car. The rest is history.
Take care, Richard, and send me that gum! ;)
Brahma
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