Where to harvest earth pigment for paint making on the Left Coast of North America (PNW and BC)?

I've been wanting to find earth pigments for paint making for a very long time.  Ever since I first read that thread and see the glory of handmade paints from locally sourced minerals.

Go I got some books out from the library and have a slightly better idea of where I might find some... and yet, they don't seem to help.  They talk about clay rich soils (we don't have clay on this part of the Island where I live off the Left Coast) or traditional roman mineral mines (also sadly lacking in Roman conquest in this part of the world /s)

I keep looking when I dig in the garden and don't seem to find anything like the books describe.  Maybe I'm just not looking right?  

The local First Nations traditions (I'm mostly familiar with Songhees and Cowichan traditions from my area) used mostly Lake Pigments derived from plants.  There's an example in this thread about making watercolours on how lake pigments work.  This makes a good backup, but I was kind of hoping for earth pigments.

I hope for a red or red/brown, a yellow-ish, and maybe a blue-ish or green-ish colour.  Ochre would be my favourite choice.  

It got me wondering, are there even earth pigments here?  The geology is pretty unique here so maybe we don't.  But I don't like that outcome, so I choose to believe we must have pigments here somewhere.

Where do I start looking?

And how will I know when I find it?  

First Nations peoples here in Australia and by the looks, in the North West, used ochre pigments (basically iron rich, very weathered rocks.  I using "pacific northwest ochre deposits" produced the following results.  No idea if any of the places mentioned are near you!  Also if the deposits are still in use by F.N.P they may have restricted access
Ochre, a naturally occurring iron oxide pigment, is found in various locations across the Pacific Northwest, including red and yellow clay deposits near Deer Park and Spokane, a red clay at Clay City, and red basalt earths near Salem and along the Columbia River.
Black was usually made from charcoal mixed with animal fats,  for textiles manganese rich soil (resulting from volcanic activity)
Local Geological Survey may be helpful, or not, but maps may be available

I'm not sure about your island, but my area of the Pacific Northwest was also scraped by the giant ice sheet. Like you, I'm rather devoid of clay. Most of my soil is silty and gravelly.

I have a feeling that gritty/crystal-ly rocks like granite and quartz aren't terribly good for paints. If they were, people would have ground up amethysts and peridot for paint...and they didn't.


Calcium is a great source of white pigments--I wonder if I our big chunky white shells would turn into a nice white pigment?

Lamp black and charcoal should make a nice black.

Woad should make a nice lake blue, but it is very dark--almost like india ink. My daughter painted a watercolor with indigo watercolor, and it hasn't faded in two years, despite being hung on the wall.

Oxidized copper makes a light blue-green color, and I think copper was once found in the area (or maybe just brought in?). I'm pretty sure the area had copper tools for a while, but then switched to mostly bone and some stone tools. Lots of use of cedar!

I wonder what the local Salish Sea peoples used for paint. Did they tribes up in B.C. originally paint their totem poles, or did they simply carve them?

I found this PDF about totem pole painting and conservation, and it mentions:

“totem poles were painted with a type of fish-egg tempera, consisting of a mineral pigment mixed with a mordant of fresh salmon eggs and saliva. The colors originally were red, black, and green or blue. The red was obtained from hematite, the black from graphite
and carbon, and green/blue from various copper ores common in the
region.”

How about using iron bacteria for the red/brown pigment? Don't know how abundant they are in your area (it seems to vary) but if you see an old ditch or pond that hasn't been disturbed in a while and there's a fuzzy reddish-brown cover on the bottom, that's probably iron bacteria. They derive their energy by oxidizing Fe(II) ions to Fe(III), and the resulting mineral is iron (III) hydroxide. If you found a bunch, you could also convert this to other iron salts for different nuance pigments.

Snoqualmie pass, in Washington state, has some beautiful green crumbly rock in the road cut.    Right at the top of the pass on the north side of the highway.

I gathered some a few years ago and made some rough paint.  Lots of different hues in there.

The last time the ice age was here is only a few hundred years ago.  Most of what is left is hardened volcanic cores and glacial tilth.  Add to that, most of the landmass of this island wasn't part of Pangaea (the big supercontinent) sot the basic building blocks are different than most of the world.

A friend now departed, learned directly from the elders of some of the local first nations around the islands here (mostly Salish language group).  A lot of the colour for paints was plant based.  Boil the bark and you get red.  Pee on it and let it ferment for black.  This would be more dye than pigment based.  Further north, like Haida language groups, he said the colour was more pigment and earth based.

Which makes sense as officially, the northern tip of Vancouver island is one of the nearest locations recognized for iron based pigment gathering.

But I imagine and hope that there must be smaller pigment deposits around.  Glacial eddies where minerals get deposited and things earthquakes churned up.  

But how to recognize them?

100 year old assessment of mineral pigments in the pacific northwest, with a focus on the USA.

This pdf might be useful as it covers bc and clay.  Somehow, my brain thinks that clay may have a relationship to ochre.

My gadget is being stubborn and won't download it, so I recommend running it through a checker before trying.

https://cmscontent.nrs.gov.bc.ca/geoscience/publicationcatalogue/Bulletin/BCGS_B030.pdf

Texada, perhaps?  I just know it has a completely different mineral base - limestone instead of our usual... going to pretend I know confidently what the rest of the province is... what's that, I'm needed in the other room?  Excuse me for a sec.

I managed to download it without any issue. I've attached the file down below (that should also help prevent it from disappearing like so many things disappear on the internet.)

Today's quest has been frustrating.

The goal - find out what ochre and other earth pigments look like in nature.   All I get are ads for buying paint.  

Maybe it's all around me and I'm not seeing it.

r ransom wrote:Today's quest has been frustrating.

The goal - find out what ochre and other earth pigments look like in nature.   All I get are ads for buying paint.  

Maybe it's all around me and I'm not seeing it.

Ah! A great source for that is the Ancient Pottery channel on youtube!

This is the video I showed my history students:



He goes through the process of finding where the ochres are and then goes out and shows the different colors of the ochres found in the wild.

Down here, where the glaciers did a big number on our clay soils (i.e. we don't have any), I never see anything like what he's going after.

Another video I've seen showing ochres in the wild is the Secrets of the Castle series by BBC.  It's a lot more wet in France where this castle is being built, so the look of their ochre is more like what we'd probably find: