Charcoal

Last weekend, I started making some new charcoal. The first batch that I had produced earlier in the year made for an excellent drawing charcoal, but failed as a paint pigment. I'm working on refining the process, so that it can be used for both.

The trick is to bake the wood just right minus oxygen, so that it is mainly reduced to pure carbon. The wood should be allowed to breathe just a little, because it will outgas as it bakes. Allow too much air and it will be reduced to ash.















I gathered up willow branches, allowing them to dry several weeks in advance. They were stripped of all of their bark. Using the trimmers, I cut them into many small pieces.

I'm considering building some kind of retort to burn the wood in the future, but for the time being, I'm relying on the same methods I used for my first experiments.















The willow sticks were stuffed into a stoneware bowl lined with foil, wrapped again with foil, and the top of the bowl was covered. It was placed in the hot wood oven.















The charcoal fresh out of the oven. I would guess it is about 80 percent charcoal at this point.

A New Mortar & Pestle

Just a small update-I've purchased a new mortar and pestle, this time made from granite. Dark granite is stronger than most materials, and not much more expensive. I think it will be better suited to grinding hard minerals than the marble or porcelain I was using previously.

More about Yellow

A bright yellow is an important addition to any artists palette. Modern yellow pigments are synthetic, based on mineral or organic mixtures. These colors, such as Cadmium yellow are permanent, and incredibly bright. For a painter wishing to achieve natural effects they demand caution and restraint, otherwise they can become overpowering.

On the other hand, there are less intense and more subtle historical alternatives that are still available today. These are all mineral-based. Natural organic colors such as Weld, are not lightfast, so I would not consider them.


Orpiment














Orpiment is a bright rich yellow, based on the natural mineral arsenic sulfide. The presence of arsenic makes it very toxic. In fact the mineral was once used as a fly poison.

Orpiment was a common feature on palettes going back to ancient times. It was a popular color in Italy during the Renaissance, but was not the preferred choice in Northern Europe. By the 19th century, Orpiment had been wholly replaced by alternatives.

Orpiment's other major flaw is that it is incompatible with lead and copper based pigments. This means it cannot be used in mixtures containing lead white, for instance. I feel that this is far too limiting, so I will not be using this color.


Lead-Tin Yellow















Lead-tin yellow is a synthetic bright opaque yellow, made by combining lead and tin oxide. Most varieties tend to be on the pale side. The color was most popular during the 15th to 17th centuries. Because it contains lead, it is highly toxic. It is also relatively expensive.

An example of lead-tin yellow, from the painting Equestrian Portrait of the Duke de Olivares, by Diego Velázquez.

Naples Yellow















Naples Yellow is also made in the lab, by combining lead and antimony. The color varies depending on how it is made, but tends towards a deeper, more orange opaque yellow. It was gradually adopted as a replacement for Lead-tin yellow, probably around the 16th Century. It is highly toxic.

As lead has been gradually phased out of most products, genuine Naples Yellow has become hard to find. Most colors sold today going by the name are imitations. They are convenience mixtures that lack the beauty or permanence of the real thing. When purchasing the color one must ensure that it is genuine. Real Naples Yellow is expensive, so a low price should raise suspicions.

Ultramarine, Part I

There is one natural blue pigment that is considered without peer: Ultramarine. A common color on European palettes by the Middle Ages, it is the color of the blue skies of the Renaissance, of Leonardo. Its name comes from the Italian oltramarino, "beyond the sea," as it had to be brought across the Mediterranean to Europe from the other side of the known world. Real ultramarine is made from the semi-precious stone Lapis lazuli, which is only available from a few locations around the globe.

The very best Lapis lazuli comes from the remote mountains of Badakhstan province, in northeastern Afghanistan. The Sar e Sang mine has been in operation for more than 6,000 years. The rock was probably first exported to Ancient Egypt. Marco Polo visited this mine in 1271, during his trip across Asia.

Lapis lazuli is a complex silicate rock, containing mostly lazurite but also calcite, sodalite, and pyrite. The highest grades are more intensely blue, and have smaller inclusions.

The gold speckles are pyrite (Fools' gold).

Lapis is a difficult material to mine. It is labor-intensive to grind and purify. These factors, along with the formidable remoteness of the mine and the rock's lengthy transport, made Ultramarine incredibly expensive. Worth more than gold, the high cost put it out of reach for many artists. It was often reserved for special subjects, such as the robes of the Virgin and Child. The asking price of a painting was often based merely on the quantity of ultamarine used.

The issue of cost was taken seriously enough that the French government offered a reward to anyone who could synthesize it cheaply. In 1828, Jean Baptiste Guimet won the prize. The synthetic ultramarine he developed quickly superseded its natural counterpart and is still in use today.

Real ultramarine is distinguishable from the synthetic variety by a less intense saturation. It has a glowing, gemlike quality stemming from its crystal structure. The effect is striking.




















The painting, Bacchus and Ariadne, by Titian, serves as an example of how beautiful Ultramarine can be in the right hands. This painting was part of a series of restorations done in the late sixties. Its unveiling was controversial. The public did not associate the new colorful look with Titian, the sky in particular. Some critics suggested that this was the result of careless work by the restorers. I will not enter into this debate, but I will say that, having seen the real color, this may be what the painting looked like when it was new.

Given the high cost of finished pigment, I have decided to make my own Ultramarine from scratch. In the next installment, I will show how this was done.

A Visit to Stancills

A few weeks ago, I went to visit Stancills Mine in Perryville, Maryland. Stancills has been family run since its inception several generations ago. They produce a wide variety of products based on the sand, gravel, clay and other materials mined there.

The high quality of their clays has attracted potters from all over the east coast. The family is very supportive of artists and has cultivated a relationship with their many visitors over the years. When I saw pictures of the red clay others had gathered there, I knew I had to visit.















We were given a tour and allowed to collect freely from many different piles of clay surrounding the mine. I grabbed anything that caught my attention. Reds, a green earth, and a fistful of nice looking yellow.

When I got home, I set out to see what I could make with my new samples. The unrefined nature of the clays meant I needed to sort them first if I wanted to get the purest color. After being fully washed, sieved and dried, I could compare them.















On left is a cool, violet red. On the right, a warmer orange. Everything else was somewhere in between. I decided to work with the middle range first.















I was impressed by the strong staining power of this clay, it left a mark on anything it touched.















Mixed into paint this clay makes a nice, deep red. I think this will be a valuable color for painting flesh tones.

Why Make Your Own Paint?

Artists throughout time have included paintmaking among the many skills of their craft. Sadly, modern artists are largely unfamiliar with the process. There are still good reasons to consider making paint for yourself. How far you want to go in the paintmaking process is up to you. You don't have to make everything from scratch. You will still see most of the benefits by mulling commercial pigments as well.

Making your own paint encourages an intimate knowledge of each material, a choice of what goes into them, and permits their qualities to be altered in any way you see fit. This is a skill that the Old Masters used to get the most out of their abilities.

Think of cooking as an analogy. Most of us have bought or consumed prepackaged food in some way or another. Food prepared this way is predictable and convenient. Would top chefs want to use canned ingredients from the supermarket? Or would they insist on searching out the best ingredients, making the dishes from scratch?

Modern paints are more like prepackaged food. Like the food, artists are forced to accept the recipe the manufacturer has chosen for them. The art market is very small in scale compared to wider industrial uses of paint such as automobiles and plastics. Modern artists use what they are given, not necessarily what is ideal.

There are other benefits. Homemade paint is more likely to have purer color. Manufacturers add fillers to cut the amount of pigment in a given volume of paint, increasing profits. Usually only high end or boutique paints come close to the pigment loads of paint made by the artist's hand. These paints tend to be much more expensive. In this way, making your own paint can represent significant financial savings.

How we experience color in a painting is a consequence of the way it interacts with light. Light is altered as it reflects through the layers of paint on canvas and returns to our eyes. Modern pigments are ground to a uniform, extremely fine consistency, and are chemically very pure. I find the intensity of these paints can be overbearing if the artist doesn't make an effort to tame them. Hand ground pigments will be far more varied in their shapes and sizes of particles. These will refract (bend) the light waves passing through them in a complex fashion. The end result is more naturalistic, and these colors can be used in their more pure form, without becoming garish.

The consistency and handling qualities of paint is known as rheology. Oil paint falls into two categories: long (loose, stringy) and short (thick, buttery). Hand made paints vary in character but tend to be long. Paint would have felt this way 500 years ago. Modern paint is usually very short. It is easy to adjust the rheology of paint while you are making it. Modern tubed paint can only be altered by adding mediums. There is no evidence older artists used that much medium, and it is easily overused.

The downside of all of this is that all of this will take a great degree of patience and work. Smashing up rocks and grinding pigments is always going to be time consuming. Some historic pigments are highly toxic. It will take a bit of time to become comfortable making paint, and will require additional skill. The final quality of the product will also rest on your shoulders. Bad raw materials will produce bad results. Even if it seems daunting, I would encourage all artists to give it a try.

About Lead White

Lead white is one of the oldest artificial pigments in the artists's palette. It is also arguably the greatest pigment in the history of oil painting, used by humanity for thousands of years.

Lead was once the only decent white available to oil painters. The last century witnessed the introduction of alternatives, first zinc white, then titanium white. The result is that its use has declined significantly. Now that there are alternatives, why would we want to still use lead?

We are only beginning to understand the complex chemistry of paints, and conservation scientists have noted that paintings with lots of lead in them are usually in much better shape than their counterparts. In some cases, parts of a painting with lead are the ONLY areas still in good shape. The consensus is that lead is strengthening the structure of paintings. By contrast, the Smithsonian has recently completed a 30 year study linking the use of zinc white to major cracking, disintegration and delamination of modern paintings.

The great downside of lead is its toxicity. Even small exposures will accumulate in the body over time. Lead poisoning was noted even in ancient times, but little was ever done. Most of the risk wasn't to artists but to the individuals exposed to lead during its production. Little protection was available to workers and they were exposed to large amounts of lead as a result. Thousands would have died in this pursuit. One 1884 source I found suggests most of the lead factory workers were women. These and other concerns lead to its decline. Over the past fifty years developed countries have highly regulated its use. The day may come when its use is banned completely.

It came as a surprise to me during my research to learn that modern lead white is not the same as it once was. From Roman times up through part of the 20th century, the best lead was made with the Dutch "Stack" process. Below is an illustration of how this was done:

Note: Lead is highly toxic. I would NOT recommended trying this process on your own, it is not worth the risk.

Lead white is basic Lead Carbonate. Alchemists discovered a simple way to make this successfully using lead, vinegar and manure.















First Vinegar is added to the base of clay pots. Special pots would have been made for this purpose.















Curled sheets of lead are placed inside the pots, with a spacer in between them and the lead, so that only the rising vapors will contact the metal.















Fresh horse manure was collected from Dutch breed horses, for added authenticity. This was mixed with leaves and filled in around the pots. The pots would have been placed in a special sealed building, in many rows of stacks. The "Stack" is where the process gets its name . I used a large plastic container.















The vinegar vapors contain acetic acid, that chemically corrodes the lead, forming lead acetate. The decaying manure releases carbon dioxide and moisture, which reacts with the acetate making lead carbonate and lead hydroxide. It also generates heat that speeds the process along. It will take several months for the conversion to take place.















The box after two weeks. A significant amount of white has already been produced.















Over a month has passed, and the process is mostly complete. The lead can now be removed, coming off in large flakes. This is where the traditional name "Flake White" comes from. I ground and washed the lead, to remove impurities.















It appears the raw lead I used had copper impurities in it. These were washed out as much as possible.

The pigment was left under the sun several days to dry.















At this point, the lead white was ready to be sold as is or mixed for paint.

Lead produced in this manner has unique properties that are highly desirable for artists. Under the microscope it's particles are larger than modern lead whites. This makes it more opaque and gives it special handling qualities in oil. Lead acetate and other impurities accelerate its drying.

Stack lead white is nearly extinct. One of the only companies I know that still sells lead produced this way is Natural Pigments.