Uneven coverage issues on my paper – not sure what that’s about given this was my second attempt on the background. My first radial was ok but I went overboard with the darker blue around the edges. Between the first page treatment, the layers of paint, and then another two coats of gesso and more background, I would have figured she’d be smoothed out.
Still not happy with the darker sky edges, but the radial turned out ok and I like the impasto moon. The berries are rushed and sloppy and I wish I’d chosen a different red for the base, but it’s done. Cartoony and choppy, but recognizable; tis a start. Gretchen is thinking cotton swab or dotting tool next time; less susceptible to impatience, though not impervious. Still me.
2 Cute Red Birds tutorial by the Art Sherpa
White lead was another pigment the Greeks learned how to make artificially. The process, one that was was dangerous to health because the pigment is highly toxic, involved turning metallic lead to white lead by the action of acetic acid vapor and heat, a process still in use today.
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Verdigris was another toxic pigment that is no longer used. The pigment was made by scraping off the green deposit formed on copper, brass, and bronze–according to the writer Pliny, this deposit was made by exposing the copper to the vapor of fermenting wine, a practice that continued until the eighteenth century. The word “verdigris” is from the French verte de Grèce, meaning “green of Greece”.
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Another Italian city lends its name to the yellow, based on lead antimoniate, known as Naples yellow. The raw material for this is found in several areas, with some of the best being collected from the slopes of the volcano Vesuvius…
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Through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, some traditional pigments were replaced by new pigments, including some from particularly strange sources. One such pigment was a brown known as mummy. This was a dark bituminous pigment that was prepared by grinding to a dust the body parts of Egyptian mummies. This source is not so unusual — in the first century A.D., Pliny described in his Natural Histories how artists would dig up the charred remains of human bones to make “atramentum,” a particularly dark black pigment. Mummy, thankfully, was replaced by Vandyke brown, made from lignite, or brown coal, which contains a high percentage of organic matter.
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The two yellows gamboge and Indian yellow can still be found, although only a synthetic substitute can be found of the latter. Indian yellow was made from the urine of cattle that had been fed on a diet of mango leaves.
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The first modern synthetic pigment to be discovered was Prussian blue. This was discovered by chance in 1704, when a German color maker, Diesbach, used waste potash that had been contaminated with distilled animal oils, in a process to make Florentine lake. Instead of the desired red pigment, the batch turned out a deep blue.
Ian Sidaway, Color Mixing Bible