Making my own watercolors with natural pigments (both homemade and storebought)

Last year I bought gum arabic to make ink for my medieval history class]. I already had some natural pigments from when I taught kids how to make milkpaint in my ancient history class. Inspired by R Ranson's homemade art trading cards, I then realized that I now had all the ingredients to make my own water color paints!

This year, for the "Early Modern Period", I'm teaching the kids how to make kites, and one of the weeks they will get to paint their own kites. I thought this would be a fun way to teach them about the invention of watercolor paint cakes.

Look at this lovely watercolor paint set from the late 1700's!

Of course, to do this, I need a lot of natural watercolor sets so all the kids can easily access the paint. Time to make a bunch of watercolor trays!

Making the gum arabic solution

To make water colors, your want: pigment, gum arabic, and honey. The gum arabic makes the pigment stick to the paper, and also thickens it. The honey helps it flow well on the paper. I got my instructions for making water colors from Natural Earth Pigments.

I should have written down my exact measurements, but I'm pretty sure they were:

1 cup boiled well water (the recipe calls for distilled water, but my well water seems to do well enough)

1/2 cup gum arabic

2 tbsp honey

Gum Arabic powder, and my gum arabic solution

Adding the gum arabic solution to the pigment

Natural Earth Pigments says to add water to the pigment first, and then add the gum arabic solution.

The amount of pigment to use will vary depending upon the color. Start with a ratio of 1 part Gum/Honey to 1 part pigment paste and adjust as necessary. Mix all the ingredients and work them on a glass plate using a paint spatula. Your goal is to obtain a paste with a thick, creamy consistency. Some pigments will incorporate easier than others. Smoothest mixtures of watercolors can be obtained by mulling your final paint with a glass and muller such as our [Muller Paint Making Set] Test your final watercolors on appropriate paper by wetting them with the brush and painting a swatch down the paper. You should not see any micro-bursting of pigment particles, or clumps of unincorporated pigment.

Last week, when I made my first sets of pigments, I tried adding water first, and then the gum arabic solution. But, I was disappointed with the results. Some of the pigments, like the San Fransico Red did not like mixing with water. The pigments would either float on the top of the water, or the water would float on the pigment, but they wouldn't mix. The pigments kept spilling into other paint sections, and it was a true paint! Since honey acts as a surfactant, though, things finally started mixing when I added the gum arabic solution.

I also didn't like how much the paint ended up evaporating! I filled these little containers to the brim with paint, and they evaporated into just 1/3rd full!

Sorry for blurry picture...

This time around, I just added the pigment to the container, and then put the gum arabic solution on top, and gave it time to saturate. Then I mixed them with a paint brush. This resulted in much less mess!

Adding scoops of pigment to my new, improvised paint tray

Gum arabic solution poured over the pigment. Not yet mixed.

Mixing the pigment and gum arabic solution together with a paint brush

A full tray of watercolor paints!

The above was an improvised paint tray. My husband suggested using the Turkish Delight box, but the plastic is too fragile and prone to cracking. However, my kids love running around the pews after church and hunting down all the communion cups. I realized those would be perfect inside the Turkish Delight sections! The cups by themselves would be prone to tipping over, but the Turkish Delight box holds them in place nicely. Another added benefit is that I can take the cup out to fill with pigment and gum arabic, and I don't have to worry about accidently spilling pigment into another cup of paint.

I also bought these cute little paint trays. I want to give one to my friend for her birthday. Since it had dried out to such a small amount of paint, I added more pigment and gum arabic to each tray section. It worked much better adding just the pigment and then the gum arabic without messing with the extra water. I didn't have any pigment spill into a different color this time. Huzzah!

Pigments added to tiny trays, and then covered with gum arabic solution. Not yet mixed

Making my own pigments!

I found out that lake pigments are just dyebaths that evaporated! Crimson lake = cochineal dye. Madder Lake = madder dye. Light red  lake was usually a mix of madder, cochineal &/or logwood.

Previously, I'd dyed a bunch of wool with madder. I ended up with a bunch of dye exhaust. I let it evaporate on top of my woodstove to make madder lake! I did the same thing with my cochineal dye vat, too.

Madder dye baths

Cochineal dye bath

I also had some powdered indigo and logwood from Aurora Silk, and used that to make indigo lake (which i think is "India Ink"?) and logwood lake.

Testing my lake paints. The madder turned brown from aging, I think. The cochineal and indigo are vibrant!

Homemade pigments in the sunlight

For extra fun, I still have my jar of copper from staining my son's chessboard blue 5 years ago, and some copper mordant. I tried adding that to gum arabic to make a bice-type pigment. It came out VERY light--I don't think it likes to dissolve in the cold gum arabic solution, but I don't really have a way to heat it up without melting the little cup.

I really wanted to see if the "Turquoise Green" pigment is the same as "Bice" (I'm trying to make sure the kids can paint with all the colors in 1770's  watercolor paint set).  I'm happy to see that the Turquoise Green is very similar in hue to the copper paint I made!

Copper paint vs storebought Turquoise Green

That is so cool.

And you made lake pigment too!  

Thanks so much for sharing the project with us.  

r ranson wrote:That is so cool.

And you made lake pigment too!  

Thanks so much for sharing the project with us.  

Thank you! I fear that I use my teaching as a way to justify buying fun supplies and trying new skills. It's for the children!

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I wanted to try out the watercolors on the kite material. The kids get to chose between butcher paper and cotton fabric (thrift store sheets!) for their kites. I'm not too worried about the water color paint on the butcher paper, especially if the kids don't go heavy on the water. This water color seems a lot thicker than the cheep Crayola watercolor sets I grew up with, so I don't think the kids will be a prone to using tons of water.

I'm using the watercolors I mixed last week. I notice that the paint has cracked a LOT on many of the colors. I'm wondering if this is because I added water first, and then added the gum arabic solution. This resulted in there being less gum arabic/honey to the pigment, so it's more chalky? I might add more pigment and gum arabic to this set and see if that fixes things.

I also noticed that the paint bleeds a lot! I don't usually watercolor, and I've never watercolored on Canvas. I'm wondering if the kids are going to get mad/frustrated by the bleeding paint? Is there a "sizing" (is that the right word?) that I can add to the fabric so it doesn't bleed so much?

Testing out the paint on a left over scrap of cotton sheet fabric. The watercolor bleeds a lot!

I wonder if some sort of sizing would help with the bleeding?   They use gelatin (I think that is how it is spelled, like for jello) for sizing watercolour paper otherwise the paint would bleed everywhere.

A flour paste might work too, but I can't remember if that is for painting or stiffening.

Something like this perhaps?  https://www.naturalpigments.ca/artist-materials/sizing-paper-gelatin?srsltid=AfmBOorWjTt1VGuKhsa9EchQNaYiQo6Yku4mBMLbegCYsbGbKeepRRHE

Gelatin might be just the trick! It'll be a pain to apply to all the kites (the kites are 30 inches across and 36 inches tall, in a diamond shape). Thankfully a little over half the class chose to make their kites out of paper, rather than cloth, so that should cut down on the amount of prep time. I bought a giant bag of gelatin a while back when I had to make jello for a potlucks once a month--so I should hopefully have enough to size 10 kites.

Will you have access to the cloth before it becomes kite?  Maybe dip applying where you dip the cloth in the sizing instead of painting it on?  I don't know if it would work.  All I know is from when I was sizing yarn for weaving which is usually applied by dipping it in the pot.

Yes, I have access to the cloth--I've been collecting cotton sheets from the thrift store over the past few months. I'll be cutting out all the kites here at home, because there's only 50 minutes in each class. So, I could easily dip them before the kids paint them.

Can I iron the gelatin-sized cloth after I dip it? Or, will the heat of the iron activate/destroy the gelatin in weird ways?

I don't know.  That's a pretty important question.

We can iron starch and that helps activate the starch too.  That was on the list of possibilities.

We are heading well beyond what I've tried or read about.  

Nicole Alderman wrote:Or, will the heat of the iron activate/destroy the gelatin in weird ways?

I'd also be concerned about gumming up the iron in hard-to-fix ways. (Not that I have any reason to think it's likely, just a note of caution.)

The other issue is, how will the sizing affect the flight of the kite. I'm thinking that it would likely make the kite more wind resistant, which is good. But, it will also make it heavier. But by how much?

Is gum arabic used as a sizing? Do I want to use that much gum arabic on yards of fabric?

I'm afraid the gelatine might melt and burn on the iron, making nasty residue that is hard to scrape off, like Christopher suggested.
Maybe dipping in gelatine is too much. Maybe brushing the finished kites with a gelatine solution (with a broad brush) and then blow-drying before painting will do the trick?
Can you test on small scrap pieces for the different methods ? Also, if you choose to dip the cloths, maybe wring out the cloth after as much as possible and iron with a sheet of baking paper or similar between the cloth and the iron?

I'm guessing it would become too expensive to use gum arabic as a sizing agent?

Sooo many questionmarks...

I thought that the easiest way to test how bad the bleeding is, would be to use my kids as test subjects. If they don't get bleeding that makes them mad, then other kids probably will be fine, too.

I called them over and said I needed them to paint on the cloth. My son took the task literally: He just applied some green and red paint to his cloth and asked if he was done. No sadness about how the paint was working, so that's good!

My daughter went for a more fancy design, but thought it looked really pretty, even when it bled. No sadness there, either!

I think this means I don't need to use any sizing. Score!

What a wonderful way to test.  

R Ranson's said in the  earth pigments and handmade paint thread,

When I first started with not great quality paints, the dried paint keep falling out of the pan.  I got fed up and glued them in with the only sticky thing I had at the moment-honey.

I

Since the paint I'd originally made was really crackly (especially the black. A lot of it cracked right out of the pan!), I thought I would use my left over gum arabic and honey mixture to make a little more paint to add to each pan.

My paint was rather crackly. Let's fix it!

But, it's been two weeks since I made the mixture. And in those 2 weeks, the mixture has fermented! It fizzled when I opened it, and smelled a bit like vinegar and/or kombucha. I was worried that maybe the humectant properties might have been digested by the fermentation, so I added some more gum arabic and honey, and used it. The pans have been drying for about a day or two, and I see BUBBLES! The fermentation kept making bubbles as the paint dried!

Bubbly watercolors--who would have thought that watercolors could ferment!

Moral of the story is: don't add honey to your gum arabic unless you're going to (A) Can or refrigerate it, like Madison Woods suggests, or (B) use it all that day!

I've had a jar of just hydrated gum Arabic that's been around for a year, without any fermentation or smell. It just had some chunks in it (maybe water had evaporated?). But, man, this premade gum Arabic sure likes to ferment!

I never would have thought the binder would ferment.  Logically, it makes sense, it just never occurred to me.

Do fermented paints still paint?

I suspect it might not be 100-year archival, but for kites, no problem.

The paints still worked--both on cotton sheet fabric and on butcher paper! I brought my fermented gum arabic just to show the kids (and other parents) what happens if you leave the stuff to ferment for a while. Many of them were interested in the science of it! Thankfully the smell evaporated from the paint I made. I didn't use any of the fermented gum arabic to make more paint. Instead, I  brought gum arabic and honey and made more paint on the spot for kids who wanted specific blends of colors, or who needed a LOT of specific color, or needed chalk added to their paint.

The bleeding didn't seem to be a problem. Most of the kids were going for large designs--even painting their whole kite--that no one even noticed the bleeding. Some of the kids put the effect to use by flicking their brush to make speckles of paint on their kites.

Adding chalk (calcium carbonate) dust did a great job of making the paint more opaque for the kids that were painting light colors and dark butcher paper. We even managed white clouds and yellow suns on a red background!

I also found that butcher paper holds up surprisingly well to water color. Not one of the kids' kites had the paper rip from over wetting (we did have to help some kids use less water, but usually by the time they've used too much, it's too late).

Some of the kids wanted brighter colors (yellows and oranges) that I didn't have pigments for. Thankfully, the classroom next door had conventional watercolor trays, and I just brought those in for those two kids.

All in all, the kids had fun. The paint worked well, and we had a lot to clean up (the paint loved wicking through the cotton sheet fabric to make the table very painted!). I only got pictures from one of my classes, but they're a good sample of how paint worked out.

What a wonderful day!  It worked a treat and great idea about adding chalk!