Making Watercolours

I’ve been thinking about making watercolours for a few months now. I am not sure why I make things difficult for myself at times, as this is plainly not the easiest way to acquire paints. I think some of this was stumbling across the interesting selection of pigments sold by L. Cornilessen and Son (which looks such an amazing shop and I want to go there NOW!) and a ‘blog post from Jacksons on the subject. When I saw the book Found and Ground which is all about creating ones own paints from naturally foraged pigments., of course that went on the Christmas List.

This takes you through creating your own medium (including from foraged cherry gum) but for once in my life I have had the sense to start with easy steps. I ordered some Senellier Watercolour Binder and some pigments from Jacksons and set to work…

My eventual aim being to create paints from local materials, I bought mostly earth colours with the indea of building up an interesting pallete of earth colours. Quite a few I fancied were out of stock, but I bought:

• Transparent Gold Ochre (PY43)
• Terre Ercolana (PR102)
• Verona Yellow (PY43)
• English Red Deep (PR102)
• Haematite Red (PR102)
• French Ultramarine (PB29)

The latter is obviously not an Earth, but it is, albeit synthetic, a mineral pigment (and was chosen by a certain someone who is not me)… It, as you will see, has also had an interesting use.

I started off with about 5g of pigment, and about 4mls of binder which seemed to give a decent consistency and mulled this in a small mortar and pestle, adding a couple of drops of water where it seemed to need it. This gave enough to have a decent amount to work, yet not too much and resulted in about 2-3 half pans. It’s hard to know how long to mull for – articles I have read suggest anything from 5 minutes to an hour – I don’t doubt that the longer you do it the finer the paint, but I am aiming for grit and character here and in the end worked on mulling until the sound of the paint was like the sticky sound one listens for when rolling lino ink. This has seemed to work OK.

As I found when mixing the Stuart Semple Paints this seemed like wasting quite a lot that I could not scrape out, though I diluted this down and painted it wet-in-wet on some squares of Rowney Aquafine Cold Pressed paper to use as grounds for future images, and also this allowed me to see the behaviour of the paint on a larger scale.

I mixed a batch of all these pigments, along with a mixed pigment colour using the red haematite and French Ultramarine. I really like mixed pigment colours in granulating paints where the pigments do their own thing, and this, which I have called Blood Plum” has worked very well in this respect.

I then left them to dry. This has perhaps been the less easy part of the experiment – I am not sure if it the very viscous nature of the honey based Senhellier medium, or the crappy wet weather, but drying the pans to any level where I can put them in a pallete, let alone store them has take over a week. Thinking on, it may be best to use tubes and fill pans halfway from these, though this means makign greater amounts to full the easiest availible empty tubes. This, and also perhaps trying the Schminke medium is a futher avenue to explore.

Anyway, here’s the results.

I’m looking forward to using these fully. All in all this has been considerably easier than I expected and acheived some great paints. Next stop, foraged pigments…