Earth's Pigments
When there are stones beneath me, I usually look down to make sure that I don’t miss something special. ✨
THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE BEEN READING MY BLOG POSTs SINCE THE VERY BEGINNING, KNOW THAT I’VE VISITED ICELAND TWICE. THAT WAS LAST YEAR AND ALMOST TEN YEARS AGO.
The photo below (on the right) is me in my kind of paradise at the time when we visited a Stone & Mineral collection in a small village in Iceland (2011). This is a collection of the lady Petra (=stone in Greek) whose woden statue is on the photo. Throughout her whole life, she’s gathered thousands of stones and minerals she found in the mountains near her home and brought them to her house and garden where I stand on the photo.
12 years old me, with many photos of shiny minerals on the phone, holding stones I got from Petra’s store in my hand.
“I have seen such beautiful things, incredible beauty that I can’t put into words.”
Since I can remember, I was very passionate about stones. I could spend whole days walking around, observing stones of different kinds and shapes. I remember the time during our holidays in Morocco, when we stopped in the rocky desert, at 12PM and 45°C.
It was hot as hell, but it all changed when I accidentally dropped a ball-like stone on the floor. The stone cracked, and its inside showed. It was full of crystals! I forgot about the circumstances and just continued searching for another ball. I’m watching it right now on my desk, and I admire its beauty over and over again.
Me and my brother, in search of stones in the middle of nowhere. Morocco. P.S.: The car is on sale (Toyota Land Cruiser HDJ 80).
The first wish that came to my mind for every birthday was “a new kind of stone.” Wherever I go, I search for some beautiful stones which I store in my room. I have stones on my desk, on my shelves and carefully packaged in many boxes. I’ve never studied stones, so I still don’t know the names for most of them (*if you are better at that - I would love to hear from you!). What is most important to me is their appearance and how they make me feel when I see them. Everything else is of secondary importance. However, I look forward to learning more about them - their geological side and their healing power.
There is something in the stones that make my heart and soul sing. I LOVE picking, observing, touching them, and…now also making pigments out of them. If you are interested in how I recently draw a picture using natural pigments, you are welcome to continue reading. ⚡️
Last year, I painted my first photo of a bigger size (1mx1m), made for my mom’s office decoration. At that time, I fell in love with the process of painting intuitively, solely following the inspiration from the very moment. The result was an abstract acrylic painting-one of only a few of the artworks I was delighted with in my whole life.
The finished painting in a place where it was meant to hang. WATER X ENERGY X UNIVERSE
The motivation to paint more was high, but soon I realized I need to pass some exams before I fly to Iceland-the brushes needed to wait. In Iceland, I became more aware of the ecological problems we are facing and fell in love with its rocks. I spent more than 2 months there, not realizing that I could break some of the shiny, colourful, “fluffy” stones and use them in my paintings.
The idea came a month later, when I became more conscious of the ingredients that acrylic paints are made of. For instance - some liquid acrylics designed for pouring have a sign: “contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer”. That’s when a will to find nature and human friendlier options arose. I thought about colourful stones. After little research, I found out that it actually is possible, even without the expensive equipment and large scale processes.
And so my journey of making art out of powdered stones began.👀
I’ll show you step by step the process of how I’ve approached the challenge. ;)
Icelandic stones. 💕
I. In a search for clay and stones
At first, I was a bit skeptical about my ability to make a powder out of the local stones, so I began with clay. There is plenty of it (in at least two distinctive coluors) on the local stream banks. I mixed it with water, removed the impurities, and let the water evaporate under a radiator’s heat.
And that’s how I got my first two shades!
Winter in the forest - it was tricky to reach clay under the ice crystals.
My little evaporation factory.🤩
I applied a different amount of clay colour on a paper and watched the result. Both colours were shining, which was sooo fascinating to me!
Then I came around a video of Jonna Jinton, making her own stone pigments from the “real” (=hard) stones. It gave me the motivation to finally reach for stones. I am lucky to live in an area where we have many stones that are actually made out of clay, which means they are easy to break. Furthermore, they are very coulorful, which enabled me to find many different shades for my pigment collection.
Unbelievable, how many different colours of stones can be found in one small place, less than a kilometer away from my home.
This one is lying along the way to the forest, waiting for bypassers to stop and admire it. Well, it doesn’t happen often, but when it does, this person is usually me.
II. New sources of pigments
Once I became aware of the colourful stones in my surroundings, I noticed interesting pigments. Not only in stones, sand, and clay but also in wood and charcoal, for instance.
It gives pure, shinning black colour.
This pink powder from lichee also smelled nice.
III. Making smooth pigmented powder
To make naturally coloured paint, I had to crush the material into small particles, strain them (strainers with different mesh sizes), and grind the sand in my granite mortar.
As you can see, you need very basic equipments. 😉
I wasn’t too precise-the powder wasn’t totally smooth, so the final results on my test painting were… Well, not the best.
A collection of the pigments/sand that I had when I decided to make a first testing painting.
IV. Does it work? Let’s test it!
After a month or so of gathering different materials and grinding them into kind of a powder-like texture, I decided that I am ready for the first try. Even though I knew it was only a test and a little experiment, I was quite disappointed with the result.
The sand actually somehow stick to the canvas, but what disappointed me was the colours. Once I combined them with water, the previously different shades of pigments became more or less the same. And not very bright, which made me sad.
This is before I decided to make another layer and use fingers to blur the lines. When the paint dried a little bit, it got a consistency of chalk or pastels.
At the end it looked like this:
To me, it represents a space rider during a rush hour. However, I think that I was the only one who saw something in the painting.
V. 1st big naturally pigmented painting
I then forgot about the pigments until my mom wished to get another painting for her office. This time she wanted it to be 80cmx80cm big, in warm colours. I felt it was time to make a naturally pigmented painting. However, I played it a little bit safer. I used an artificial, colourless medium to make a thicker consistency of the paint and to make pigments stick better to the surface. It worked!
Again I started with no clue what the painting will look like. The only thing I knew I wanted to incorporate in the artwork was nature. The message I wished for the painting to speak was the human’s deep connection to the Earth.
the process of making the painting
For the first colour, I chose golden clay. I mixed the powder with some water and added a little bit of acrylic medium. I started with a bigger brush, and that’s what happened. My hand was following the intuition solely. Once some shapes were on the canvas, I could see what the painting was about - the root system or kidney’s glomerulus.
The next step was adding more colour. I wanted contrasts, and that’s how it ended up. I mixed dark red with a little bit of light grey pigment from Costa Rica to create a lighter colour. To me, it represents the heart muscle, being intertwined around the roots. The genuine connection between humans and nature. Isn’t it? It is interesting that my mum actually wanted to improve her heart and kidneys’ health, which she hasn’t told me before.
I wanted to create a more powerful contrast, and since all other pigments are either very earthy or blue, I took a risk and used black charcoal. In my opinion, the result was quite incredible. After I painted two layers of charcoal, the colour became totally black. It represents soil and heart tissue. That’s what I see and feel.
Since my mom and I both like shiny things, I had to add something like that to make a painting more vibrant and add some relief. I used pine tree bark, which I picked during one of many walks in the local forest during the quarantine. Then I added glitter glue and golden powder. Not natural, but maybe one day, I find a natural solution also for the shiny parts.
I glued it on the photo and voila - the final result was here. I must say that I like it, and it felt even better when my mum was pleased with it and now admires it in her office. She will soon have a gallery there, so stick around so that you don’t miss the exhibition’s grand opening! 😜
As you could notice, I am at the very beginning of the journey of discovering the universe of natural pigments. I’m excited to dive more into and paint new big canvases. I would like to find a natural medium, more vivid colours, and shiny elements. To sum up - many lands are waiting for me to discover. 🕵️♀️
Namibia 2016.
“In the future, I plan to organize a workshop(*), where I would show you how I make paint from picking the stones to painting a picture. you would do it with me, of course. interested? ”
*free
-Let me know by contacting me anywhere you can find me in the virtual world (or in-person).
P.S.: I also look forward to travelling again, but until then, I will try to find, create, and capture as many beauty in my home country as possible.