As I write in mid-November, the extremely important UN Climate Change Conference – COP29 – is in full swing.
Those of us that paint can do our bit to help bring Global Warming under control by choosing paints made from environmentally-friendly pigments, such as these Natural Examples:
As you see, the resulting pigment powders often have names that are variations of ochre, sienna and umber.
As a landscape artist, 95% of my work is based on four constituents:
Paper from cotton.
Natural Earth Pigments
Filtered Water.
Gum Arabic liquid.
Natural Earth Pigments are overwhelmingly clays, found all over our planet, where the reddish-brown colour comes in the main from iron oxide, varied by the presence of other colouring agents. They often colour the real landscape and their artistic use by we humans dates back to prehistoric times.
They have nothing to do with plants; indeed, they are inorganic and therefore extremely permanent, as demonstrated by paintings that have kept their colour for thousands of years, such as the 17000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings in France.
I explain how to make your own watercolour paint https://youtu.be/JB9FbjtrTgI
And how to make your own Gum Arabic ‘carrier’ that attaches the pigments to the paper. https://youtu.be/0YiW4IdMy6g
Prue
Watercolour - the environmentally friendly painting medium