1.5 million years ago, Homo erectus became the first species ever to wield fire. Controlling fire is the most significant technology in human evolution: fire made cooking possible, and gave early humans warmth, lighting and protection against predators. Cooking made meat, roots and vegetables easier to digest, and changed human physiology forever. With a campfire, darkness became more manageable, and early humans felt more at ease at night, which allowed for contemplation and shared stories.

We owe fire everything we are—the way we eat, think, and transform the world around us. With fire also came ceramics, metal work, and, much later, the Industrial Revolution. Without controlling fire, maybe we would still be lurking inside caves, waiting for the sun to rise once again.

If all of that wasn’t enough, fire made even another thing for us: charcoal. Burnt wood becomes an intensely black material, soft and brittle. Red ochre is, by all accounts, an older pigment, but charcoal has a clear advantage over ochre—once burnt, it is ready to be used, and can already be in stick form, perfect for drawing, writing, or making marks. Ochre needs a binder to become paint, charcoal doesn’t (or not always).

Along with red, black is the most common color found in prehistoric sites. The black in rock art can be manganese oxide, but I would wager that charcoal is way more common in prehistoric sites, because it could be made every time there was a fire. A resource that can be made every time you need is much more useful than something you need to find in the wild.

Charcoal is still a powerful pigment for art making, and you can make it yourself with just a few tools and fire. In the fourth installment of the Pigment Guide, we temporarily leave mineral pigments to learn how to make your own charcoal for drawing, and also how to use charcoal as a black pigment. It is not a complicated process, and you can experiment with different kinds of wood and see which one works better for your purposes.

A small reminder that the Pigment Guide is series of posts where I will teach you how to make paint from earths and soils (plus other recipes and techniques to make your own binder, charcoal, watercolors, and more) using the natural resources available in your landscape.

I’ve gathered this knowledge through years of hands-on experimentation and deep research about the history of colors and pigments. If you’ll like to gain full access to these, and other subscriber-only content from my newsletter:

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Homemade charcoals

What you need:

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In the third post of the Pigment Guide, we take everything we did to gather and make pigments into actual paint, starting with watercolors, a classic painting technique, easy to approach by everyone, art training or not, and to use everywhere: watercolors are ideal to paint outside, in a park, the beach or the countryside, because you don’t need much equipment or an easel, just a watercolor paper notebook, a brush and water.

In this post, you’ll learn how to make a natural binder from trees in your area (plus from honey and gum Arabic) and how to make watercolors using these binders and the pigments you learned to make in the previous post of the Pigment Guide. With this post, you’ll have all the steps to make a natural paint from your landscape, from start to finish.

A small reminder: The Pigment Guide is series of posts where I will teach you how to make paint from earths and soils (plus other recipes and techniques to make your own binder, charcoal, watercolors, and more) using the natural resources available in your landscape.

I’ve gathered this knowledge through years of hands-on experimentation and deep research about the history of colors and pigments. If you’ll like to gain full access to these, and other subscriber-only content from my newsletter:

What are watercolors?

Watercolor is a painting technique, or a type of paint if you will. You’ve probably heard of words like oil paint, tempera or acrylic when people talk about works of art, or when you’ve read a wall label in an exhibition (or, if you are a seasoned artist, you have used these techniques already). The different types of paint are not defined by the pigments, but by the binder used to make the paint.

A binder is what’s added to pigments to make paint—it gives paint its consistency and viscous texture. In the case of oil paint, like its name indicates, the binder has to be an oil (we’ll learn more about oil paint in the future). In watercolors, pigments are suspended in a water-based solution. Ancient Egyptians already used watercolor paint, so this technique has a long history of use.

There are several binders you can use to make watercolors: tree gums, honey or glycerin. In this post, we’ll learn how to use honey and different tree gums. I have developed a recipe to make your own binder from the trees in your area, so you can make watercolors just based on the landscape around you: pigments from the soil, tree gum and water.

Apart from learning something new to make for yourself and with your hands, a positive aspect of making watercolors from local resources is that you are helping the environment. Everything we buy has to travel long distances to make it to our homes, so it is not only the industrial production of goods that is damaging the planet—it is the transportation system that moves all over the world to sell those products.

When you source locally, you’re avoiding the weeks of travel through air, land and sea that every product goes through until getting to your local shop, or to your doorstep.

Another positive: you know exactly the materials you are using and where they came from, something very difficult to know from product labels if you’re not a chemist (and even then, knowing how something was made and where is almost impossible).

Nevertheless, a reminder that natural doesn’t necessarily means safe and that you need to be mindful of mineral soils because you can’t know for sure all they contain (a reminder of safety measure below).

Tools to make your own watercolors:

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Welcome back to the Pigment Guide. In the second post, you will learn the most crucial aspect of making pigments—how to transform what you find in nature into a powder that you’ll be able to use to make your own art materials. This is probably the most important part of paint-making, because pigments are the basis of any paint: their texture, coloring power, composition and fineness will decide the quality of any technique you use later.

Before we start, and if you haven’t already, I encourage you to read the previous post of the Pigment Guide, so you can follow the steps to get to what we are going to learn here:

In the previous post, I left you with a little bit of homework: to find a few potential places to gather pigments, and if you could, visit them and gather some earth and rocks to experiment with in the next post of the series. Today, we are transforming those rocks into pigment, starting with the tools you need for this process.

Materials to turn your findings into pigments:

· A mortar and pestle (to start, I recommend you get one made of granite, so you’re sure that you will be able to crush hard minerals. If you decide to get more equipment, you can buy mortar and pestles from other materials—brass, marble, porcelaine—later on)

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The Pigment Guide is a new series of posts where I will teach you how to make paint from earths and soils (plus other recipes and techniques to make your own binder, charcoal, watercolors, and more) using the natural resources available in your landscape.

I’ve gathered this knowledge through years of hands-on experimentation and deep research about the history of colors and pigments. If you’d like to go on a journey to extract color from the natural world, welcome aboard!

I’ve enabled the chat for paid subscribers so you can share your findings or ask any questions you might have about the pigment guide. My idea is creating a learning community with everyone interested in this process, so no matter where you are in the world, we can solve doubts together, and share our discoveries.

You don’t need to be an experienced artist—you don’t need to be an artist at all. You just need to be curious and willing to get your hands dirty (literally!). For me, pigments are a way to do material research. For you, it can be anything you want. If you’ve never painted before, but you’re curious about the process to make natural paint, that’s all you need.

Introduction: what is color?

Color is very difficult to define, because it doesn’t really exist. The objects around us are not one color or another–what we interpret as color is a mix of light’s visible spectrum, the way it is absorbed or reflected by a surface, and the way our eyes receive and decode that information.

When light hits an object, its surface absorbs certain wavelengths, and reflects others. Only the reflected wavelengths can be seen by the eye, and therefore only those colors will be perceived in your brain. Ironically, a red apple is every color except for red–the color that reflects, and the one we can perceive.

Since very early, our prehistoric ancestors learned how to make, manipulate and use color in several ways. Both pigments and dyes were used in the Paleolithic, and recent archeological discoveries prove that the use of colorants is much older than anyone could have anticipated only a couple of decades ago.

Manipulating and using color is one of humanity’s first chemical experiments. These people had to create everything from scratch, because there was no store to go to for a bit of paint–nature was their store.

Today, we have almost infinite possibilities regarding pigments and dyes, both natural and synthetic, to the point that most people have forgotten how to make color, and where it comes from, the same way we have forgotten many other crafts as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, buying paint or ink at a fine arts store is easier and more convenient, but I believe there is value in learning how to make something for ourselves, in using our hands and our bodies to create something–a value that cannot be replaced by simply shopping for that same thing. This guide’s goal is for you to do as prehistoric peoples did: to see nature as your ‘store’ when trying to make paint.

Some useful definitions to start:

Colorant: a colorant is a substance capable of tinting other materials. Colorants have been used since the Stone Age from materials derived from plants, animals and minerals. A colorant can be a pigment or a dye.

Dye: it is a colorant that chemically bonds with the material to which it is applied to, usually a fiber. It is generally applied in a water solution with a mordant to helps fix the tint to the fiber. Most natural dyes are plant-based (roots, berries, barks, leaves, and wood), and other organic sources such as fungi and lichens, or of animal origin, like Tyrian purple (from sea snails) or cochineal (from insects).

Pigment: A pigment is also a coloring material, but while dyes are generally water-soluble, pigments are insoluble. This characteristic is very important, because it is what makes them ideal for making paint. Most pigments used in the visual arts are dry colorants in the form of a fine powder. Since they are insoluble in water, this powder is added to a vehicle or matrix, a relatively neutral or colorless material that acts as a binder (like oil, gum or glue).

Pigments that are not permanent are called fugitive. Fugitive pigments fade over time, or when exposed to light, while others eventually turn black. It is important to understand how certain pigments behave, by themselves and in connection to others, because anything we paint with them might get substantially altered over time. Most of the earth pigments you can find in nature have exceptionally good properties, so you don’t have to immediately worry about that.

This guide is for making pigments from soils and minerals you can find in your area, so we will mostly work with iron oxides and some other earthly pigments, and also includes a nice technique to make your own charcoals for drawing. Black earths are not very common, so you have the option to make black pigment using wood (this will be a future post of the Guide).

Going out in nature and finding pigments: how to look for, and recognize potential pigments

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