Natural Art Materials

This colourful journey began in lockdown, when I began making natural inks. With time to spare, a few good books on the subject and YouTube videos to learn from, I gathered, boiled, crushed, and sieved nearly 60 different substances. For Inktober 2020 I flooded Instagram with many colourful liquids! While this was wonderful, I discovered that most of them were fugitive and faded with time. But all was not lost, I learned a lot and I still have a few favourites that are permanent which I use regularly in my work; walnut, oak gall, elderberry, sloe berry, coffee and beetroot.

My next project was crayons from plants and soil. This taught me a lot about which plants would generously part with their pigments with the heat of the melted soya wax and how to reduce a rock to a fine powder. But the crayons were a bit clumsy and I was aching to use a brush. Again, I have my favourites and regularly use these in my work, mostly as wax resist for texture.

Watercolour paint was my first love, a medium I used for a solid 10 years while living in a remote part of Zambia. So, when I saw a YouTube video on watercolour making technique, I was intrigued. With the knowledge of many natural pigments from making inks and crayons, I began transferring that knowhow to the beautiful process of paintmaking. Mixing the dry pigments with gum Arabic and honey is a very meditative process, creating a glossy, thick liquid that dries to a colourful cake. Add calcium carbonate into the mix and you have the making of a gorgeous gouache paint the consistency of icing!.

The idea that nature has generously provided this spectrum of colours to describe the landscape is as exciting to me now as it was as a child; painting the landscape with elements from it using a palette which is unique to place. Woad blue and wood ash watercolours with a little charcoal nearly creates a stormy Oxfordshire sky itself. On a recent trip to Malta, the earthy shades of ochre and sienna soil-based paints I made with some hibiscus red effortlessly created a warm local scene.

Making my own bespoke art materials – for example I like a granular texture to my watercolours – makes my work more authentic, and sourcing soil pigments and getting to know more about plants has drawn me even closer to nature.