Making a lake Pigment


 

 

A lake pigment is a pigment or colour that is created from a dye.  

 

A dye is a colour that is typically soluble in water whilst a pigment is a colour that is insoluble in water.

 

A lake pigment is made by precipitating a soluble dye with an inert base to create an insoluble pigment.  This makes it possible to create a dry powdered pigment from a liquid natural dye.

 

Making a lake pigment from natural dyes

 

To begin with, a natural dye solution is made  by gently simmering 1.2 litres of water with at least  100g dried or fresh plant material for one hour.  The  liquid should not  boil as this can affect the colour of some dyes.  The dyestuff is left steeping in the water overnight to allow the colours to develop. 

 

Any  solid plant matter from the solution is strained out using cheese cloth into  in a large container. 

 

10g aluminium sulphate (alum) is added to the solution and stirred to dissolve.  

 

Then 5g sodium carbonate (soda ash) is added and stirred to dissolve.     The soda ash reacts with the alum, which make the solutions bubble up and effervesce and solids start to form in the solution.

 

If the solution doesn’t react, more alum and soda ash is added.  The amount  is reduced to 50% of the original weight (5g alum / 2.5g soda ash) and the process repeated.

 

The solution is left to stand for at least one hour until the liquid at the top becomes clearer and there is solid matter forming at the bottom of the container. Some of this clear liquid is drained off and  the remaining solution is strained through a double layer of paper coffee filters.  Once the liquid has strained through the paper filters (which can take a day or more), distilled water is poured through the filter to wash the pigment.  The pigment paste in the filter is clean once the water filtered through it runs clear.

 

The remaining gloopy mixture in the filter is the pigment paste.

 

The  mixture in the paper filter  is left to dry.  This takes  a few days and the pigment paste reduces  in size dramatically.

 

Once the pigment is completely dry, it is scraped off the paper filter and ground in a pestle and mortar until it is a fine powder.  This is the pigment that will be mixed with a gum Arabic binder to create a watercolour that can be used in gum bichromate and carbon printing.

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