BrianKelleyArt.com

The first problem with making paint is that all the necessary materials will not be available. One will not be fully prepared to make anything that looks like paint during the early trials. My first attempts to make paint involved many undeliberated obstacles, mostly because I had not considered what tools were necessary. In the online tutorials that amateur paintmakers and pigment houses had published, it seemed important to have a pigment, a vehicle, a palette knife, a muller, and a glass plate. The first step was to mix the pigment and vehicle with the knife and then grind with the muller. My issue was that I did not have a muller. They were expensive and I was not sure I wanted to invest the money in buying one yet. It helped to know that some pigments were said to be perfectly dispersable without a muller. I have heard in a pinch, a bowl and spatula can work. This sounds more like cake though, not paint.

My inaugural pigment was vine black, PBk 8, or, in my vernacular, some sticks of soft vine charcoal I crushed with my palette knife until all that was left was a black powder that coughed dark blue clouds. It is carbon with impurities from the original vegetable matter of the vine. The pigment is an exceedingly slow drier, needs a high amount of oil to mix, and produces soft, brittle paint films. It is a dark, transparent gray with blue overtones and limited tinting power. There is not much praise to give to this pigment besides that fact that most painters already have this pigment ready and handy in their studios to be crushed into pigment.

My vehicle was linseed oil, the standard vehicle of oil paint. At the time, I again used what was handy: a small bottle of alkali-refined linseed oil from Gamblin. It is sufficient for now to say that this type of linseed oil is representative of the type and quality of vehicle used by most oil-paint manufacturers. It was, as far I could describe, yellow and oily as I knew linseed oil in its pure form to be. I began mixing the ashy dust into the oil until the two began to congeal into one. As instructed by the tutorials, I only added a few drops of oil at a time, avoiding the mistake of adding too much oil and getting a sauce rather than a paint.

Honestly, under the knife, it felt too much like wet sand. No amount of mixing and crushing would fully remove the gritty quality. It was hard to know when to stop adding oil, though. Too much oil and the dispersion of pigment on oil would start to become runny. I would then have to add more charcoal, until I could move the paint around with my knife in a more buttery or pasty way. They say you know to stop adding oil to a paint when the paint looks like it is beginning to sweat out the oil. Before this point, the paint is dry, tough, lean paste. The moment the paint sweats is the moment there is more oil than can be dispersed. Unfortunately, no amount of oil would ever cure the gritty texture, so I resigned to make the paint with an over-sweaty consistency.

It looked like paint and my knife could trowel it like paint, but how did it brush? The paint did not spread easily or smoothly. I found I had to mix in more linseed oil as a medium to get the paint liquid enough to brush. Was this what one could expect from handmade paint?

My second experiment was no more encouraging. Paintmaking tutorials often encouraged painters to first make paint from an earth color. Earth colors are not so deceptively titled; they really are made from dirt. These dirt colors: raw sienna, raw umber and the like are often the cheapest pigments. They can be bought like bags of cement mix in some places for dirt prices. Some earth colors can be costly, but only if it is an exceedingly colorful hue of dirt, and one that is not locally sourced. Natural iron oxide, PBr7, is the ASTM name for all earth colors. It is a brown that has been used since prehistory, completely lightfast, almost nearly nontoxic (some earth colors contain toxic impurities), disperses with a moderate amount of oil, is a good drier, and produces strong, flexible films. Essentially a pigment form of rust, iron oxides are so UV resistant that they can act as a partial shield against more fugitive pigments when combined in mixture. Unless you have something against brown and muted colors in your paintings, there is little to fault PBr7. So, what could I do to mess it up?

I messed by thinking it would be a good idea to mine my own dirt. Even better than cheap dirt, was free dirt. Across the street from the painting studio was a rainstorm deposit of dirt and silt that had oozed between limestone slabs onto the sidewalk. I scooped some dirt in a measuring cup. Imagine, free, lightfast oil colors that were just seeping out into the streets everyday! Since the dirt was sieving through the crack, I thought it would be mostly pure dirt and free of organic matter.

Following the advice of Tony Johansen (paintmaking.com), I left the pile of dirt to dry for several days. The water in the dirt could prevent the oil from attaching to the pigment grains. I then began to add oil and mix with my knife. This resulted in something even worse than the vine black. Small grains of a mineral were inside the dirt and were too hard to pulverize. I had an oily mud. It was not even a paste that could be easily troweled. Unable to paint with it, I left a small sample to dry on my palette and found it took several weeks to satisfactory dry to touch.

During those weeks, while visiting Lake Monroe in Indiana, I began to find deposits of a yellow earth exposed on the coast of the water. They were clumps that were somewhere between clay and blackboard chalk. I found I could draw with them on light rocks. My caveman painter impulse won out and I took a big clump home with me. Following another piece advice from Johansen, I wrapped the clump with cheese cloth and pulverized it with a hammer. There was a mixture of fine powder and pebbles left. I took as much of the power as I could and mixed with oil. Johansen recommend using a mortar and pestle to continue pulverizing, but I did not have one. The end result was more mud, although a much finer variety.

Pulverizing pigments, at least with a hammer or palette knife, was not working so well. If I really wanted to make my own earth colors, I would need to be willing to dedicate more time to making the pigment a fine grain. I needed a new approach: it was time to buy some pigment from a commercial source. I went to my local art store, Pygmalions, in Bloomington, Indiana, because I remembered they actually did sell the odd vial of pigment. Many of you know that few art stores bother to stock pigment. I bought a four ounce vial of manganese violet from Gamblin, along with a small empty tube to put the future paint in for storage. Manganese violet, PV 16, manganese ammonium phosphate, has a subdued, warm, transparent violet color, and it was a color that I had never used before and knew nothing about.

I began to mix the pigment with the oil and was relieved to see that it had no grit. There was a new problem, though. This paint had a consistency of quicksand. When left alone, the paint would liquefy. When nudged with the palette knife, the paint became leathery with a satin sheen. Paint, especially handmade paint can be a non-Newtonian fluid, and the manganese ammonium phosphate behaved as a dilatant, a shear thickening fluid. It is not so different from water and cornstarch.

I did manage to get the paint into the tube, which was not an easy thing to do, but was disappointed with how little paint I had actually made. I filled maybe half a of 35ml tube, even though the pigment itself cost as much as a full 35ml tube of paint by the same manufacturer, Gamblin. Here I was, using Gamblin linseed oil and pigment, making something far inferior for twice the price. Much like the vine black, when I did go to paint with it, I found I needed to use some artist medium to get the paint to stick to the brush. Its films were smooth and hard to touch, and semi-gloss to the eye. Its lack of tooth made it particularly hard to paint over, and over-glazes would often separate as if it was water on a greased surface. After a few months the tube began to liver, that is, the paint inside congealed and seized.

My paints were failures, but I was grateful I had not lost too much time and money at it just yet. The simple idea that pigment and linseed oil made paint seemed more and more like some impossible magic. I needed to invest more into paintmaking if I wanted something better than mud. First, I would need to obtain a muller.

I felt like the little child Timmy, the poster-boy for dull ignorance in old educational films for children.

“Timmy, do you know where food comes from?” an adult off-screen asks.

Timmy replies, “A grocery store?”

“Timmy, food comes from a farm.”

Well, where did paint come from, then? I knew I could find little tubes of paint, oil paint, acrylic paint, watercolor paint, and any thing else for the artist at an art supply store. There were also plenty of online stores to choose from. At each of these places I could choose from several different brands of paint. After buying and trying a few tubes, and if you were like me, being told which brands and colors to buy for a painting class, you had a passing anecdotal knowledge of most of the brands in your local store and many of the more common colors. There were different tiers of quality. Brands like Old Holland, Winsor & Newton (for an oil painter at least, because that is what I primarily am) seemed to be of very high quality. Old Holland sounded like and felt like something classy and restrained, like a Rembrandt or Vermeer painting, and Winsor & Newton reminded me of a high-end jewelry store in London that might have been around for centuries. Brands that seemed less familiar, with cheaper packaging, and lower prices seemed more suspect. There was also this persistent idea that I had that all colors from one brand would be of equal quality.

This still did not answer my question of origin. Where does Winsor & Newton get their raw material, and is it the same materials as Old Holland or brand X? How is it processed? I would go from brand to brand trying to understand why each would make titanium white slightly differently from the others. I began to notice that each would have the following labeled on the back of each.

Titanium White, PW6, Titanium Dioxide, conforms to ASTM

As it turned out, titanium white is made out of the molecule titanium dioxide, PW6 stands for pigment white 6, and ASTM stood for American Society for Testing and Materials. ASTM, which actually has been an international entity for some time, creates standards in many industrial fields, and it has hundreds if not thousands of standards for paints. Before ASTM, no entity indexed numbers, like PW6, and a dishonest manufacturer might have been able to sell titanium white without any titanium at all with much more impunity than today. These pigment index numbers, which could be PYx for a yellow pigment, or PRx for a red one (PBr [brown] and PBk [black] break this pattern due to PB [blue]), are an objective standard printed on any trustworthy tube of paint.

While the goal of these labels is to make things more clear, I very quickly began to find new confusions in the paint aisle. Why did mars red and venetian red have the same index (PR101) when there were two types of cerulean blue (PB35, PB36)? Colors with decidedly vague names like permanent red could be any number of pigments, depending on which brand you asked. Other colors are actually a mixture of several pigments. I have seen some that were a mixture of up to five pigments! There were also “hue” colors, like cadmium yellow hue, which meant it was a cheaper alternative to actual cadmium and actually contained no cadmium at all. One gets the impression that while modern chemistry is responsible for much of the color in paint, the individual painter’s knowledge of his colors remains very much alchemical, and why not when so much is left muddled?

No longer trusting the average art store clerk, I started reading up and researching what I could about paint and pigments. Name confusions slowly were settled, but yet another dilemma appeared. I began to learn about all the other things that go into a tube of paint. There are many types and grades of vegetable oil that can go into an oil color. Colorless filler material can substitute for the colored pigment. There are no overtly obvious or intuitive ways to know that this is or is not the case in a tube of paint, because fillers are not required to be labeled, and the manufacturer may justify them in an offhand manner by saying that they “stabilize” the paint and make it easier to brush, dry faster/slower, or have a longer shelf life before going bad. Fillers dilute the potency, tinting power, and sometimes opacity of a paint. Curiously, heavily-pigmented paints, being stronger, can be stretched further with less. Cheap, diluted paints, possibly negate any economic benefits because you need more to do the same work. One more caveat, each pigment is mixed best to a different ratio of pigment to vehicle (in our case, vegetable oil). Lean pigments that use very little oil can be rather easily touted as having a high pigment to vehicle ratio, while fat pigments that need a good deal of oil to disperse properly might seem suspect if all the consumer/painter has to go by is pigment percentage.

Were there manufacturers that did in fact make paint without fillers and only the superlative grade ingredients, to the optimum pigment to vehicle ratio? Yes, in fact. For the most part, the top tier brands are okay. I would single out Williamsburg and Robert Doak in particular for their emphasis on using the best grade pigment and vehicle, heavy pigmentation, and no fillers whenever possible. Being a painter, and a young one at that, though, I did not have a terribly great income and began to wonder how I could afford to use only the best. I began to despair at the cost of good oil paint. Was this why a painter might swear off oil and go acrylic, just for the shear cost? Then a very important idea emerged, and it was important to you, the reader, for without it, there would be nothing to read.

Why not just make my own paint? If the best oil paint was just a combination of two materials, a pigment and a vehicle, how much could I save if I made it myself? In my time researching paint, I had come across something that I now often refer to as a pigment house. Though they may sell many more types of art materials, you can buy dry pigments by the gram or milliliter from these stores. They sell rare earths, meaning earth colors that are from mines that are nearly or completely depleted and historical pigments that are no long commercially produced. Some pigment houses even make small batches on premises. Many pigments can be had in any number of shades and by different manufacturing processes that will alter the characteristics of the pigment. They sell directly to art conservators and museums and are sometimes the only source of particular pigments, in a niche industry that can hoard some pigments so long that a “rediscovery” of a lost cache in the store room can happen decades after the shade ended production. Short of being able to buy these chemicals by the ton direct from the factory, this was as far up the line as a single buyer can afford to go.

So is making your own paint cheaper, and if so, how much? The answer is not a clear yes or no. The quality of the paint is absolutely better, but the cost is gray. To make your own paint, there are the capital expenses of buying paint-making tools. One also needs to buy some vehicle in addition to just pigment. The good news is that a painter can get some good deals by buying in bulk. I have bought linseed oil by the liter and larger and pigment by the pound. Cheaper pigments, like earth browns can be ridiculously cheap when one compares them with the price of tube paints, but many of the more expensive pigments end up being about the same price as a good paint manufacturer. These manufacturers make the bulk of their profits on their “series 1” pigments. Profit margins decrease with more costly materials. I have the feeling that I am not the only painter who first pursued handmade paint on economic grounds, though I think few painters stick with it unless they begin to make paint a degree better than they can buy.

As for my first question, where paint really comes from, the answer seems to be everywhere. It can be the dirt beneath your feet, crushed gemstones, squashed bugs, ground plastic and even human remains. If you can get it into oil and keep it from fading, you can probably turn it into paint. Of course, because paint comes from everywhere, paint manufacturers and pigment houses are praiseworthy for doing most of the hunting for us. My palette is too big to farm, mine, and synthesize from scratch and still have time for painting.

This column, the Paintmaker’s Diary, is intended to be a collection of my personal experiences with pigments, paint, and color. Without fail, every pigment has a story behind it, and it is a story that continues as long as there are artists keeping the color on the palette. Rather than have a comprehensive take on all the pigments that are out there for the painter, I would rather write about the ones I know best. Others have been thorough and systematic, and if I were to contribute to pigmentology in the way they have, I would need to surpass them, which would be quite a challenge. I look forward to really beginning my first episode with paintmaking in the next article.