This is a good read, too, if you want to make your own paints! www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2020/09/25/making-handmade-watercolours-with-jacksons-artist-pigments/
After I watched your videos, I made a try and it was soooo interesting. Since I bring earth and stones back from all my trips and transform them in painting. I also began to transform my broken stone jewelry into powder and then I make my paint with or. I have an incredible yellow made of a piece of sulfur collected on a volcano in Japan. My paint box alone is a travel journal ! Thank you for the impulse !
I love your solution to the glass pestle problem- a glass pebble is easy to find and affordable, so this is great for people casually interested in making homemade paints. The colors you mixed turned out beautifully as well- I love green ochre! Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
Thank you! :) This is a very earthy palette overall, but I agree that the green is really nice. It reminds me a bit of the more muted colors of old illustrations (pre-faded? like how some new jeans are pre-ripped? haha!)
Great video Eve! 😆 I'm glad you resolved your Prussian blue issue...it had to be frustrating. The next time you can, have you thought about looking at the cheap glazed white kitchen tiles? We get our out home depot for .89 cents a tile. Completely flat with no edges and smooth...I think they are 4" squared. I use them for ink & wc mixing palettes. I think it would work great with your glass marble idea.
Ooooo, that's a brilliant idea! I did a bit of poking around and I'd have to commute somewhat far to get those tiles, but they are a very good deal (0.29 cents each? in CAD??). I'll keep a mental note to look for them if I end up in that area :) I don't know how they'd fare with the constant grinding, but can't be any worse than it is on my cheap plate XD Thank you!
Eve Bolt - Bolt's Vault bummer you would have to travel so far! Do you think you can maybe order online? I know you would have to buy more, but they work great for so many different things besides just hanging 9n the wall...lol. 😉
Unfortunately, they don't ship the tiles... but I figure that plain white gloss tiles are a staple and shouldn't go away soon, so I hope to grab a few eventually :D They really sound awesome to mix paint!
Your entire pallette was beautiful! Great eye. Nice vid. I actually enjoyed your blue but only because when it blended with the others, it was eyecatching!
Wow, they turn out very beautiful, very rich colour, I especially love the yellow/orange mixes. Now you absolutely have to do a lightfastness/opacity test, then a picture test and then a comparison of homemade watercolours and commercial watercolours. :D
Thank you! :D These are all really good ideas, I will write them down haha. Might be hard to compare with commercial watercolors because these are mostly very opaque and I don't tend to buy opaque paints. I will try but it won't be super conclusive hehe.
Still, you give hope to anyone with DIY abilities. (Not me, I have troubles making a sandwich.) Maybe you'll end up making them for sale, like RedwoodWillow's. :D
Hahaha, oh dear! I'd love to see one of your sandwiches XD I wish I could eventually sell some, tbh. I really enjoy the process, but my setup is so amateur right now. I'd need a scale, a grinding slab and a real muller, at the very least. It's on my list though, I just gotta start saving up for that (also, I'm not sure how many people would pay for a paint that can be easily found in a store (like prussian blue), since it's possibly not gonna be much cheaper... IDK how that all works lol)
The point is not being cheaper, it's being handmade. If you go on Etsy and look for handmade watercolors, the price is definitely not going to be lower than a store watercolor (I have seen a set of twelve in a tin box going for over 150USD), but it has the plus side of being handmade so it's going to be a 'new' brand. (Raise a hand if you love trying out new paints.) Plus, you support a fellow artist who stands behind their creation. You know your pigment/filler ratio and, using them yourself, you know how to mix the max amount of pigment available to get a rich colour and still get the 'right' watercolor consistency.
I see, fair enough :) And I have to raise my hand to that, as can attest my paint hoarding problem huhu. I've seen a few of those handmade paints on etsy and yeah, they don't sell for cheap that's for sure. I understand that it's paying for the craftsperson's time, and a bit for the materials (and I'm ok with that). I just, I don't know, I have to fight with myself over the fact that I'd just want to give it to my friends or nice people and that it'd be a headache to set a pricetag to a paint pan. I'm still gonna look into it all, if only for the fact that my supplies will go bad on me before I even get close to finishing a pan, so I might as well make some extra and make it available to others. Thanks a lot for your insight, it has given me a lot to think about :D
Thanks, Peter! :) I don't remember what book I used to do the test swatches, but the square swatches are made in a Strathmore Visual Journal book, the watercolor one at 140lb ( amzn.to/391uBWr ). Hope this helps! :)
@@EveBolt That's great thanks. I'm looking for a small pad to take on walks, nothing fancy, just to sketch and doodle in. The paper looked quite nice, just how I like it.
Gorgeous color palette, thank you for sharing this, it's inspiring. Seems that so many brands offer the same colors whereas this alternative can provide colors that personally appeal to the artist and appear to be more cost effective in the quantity that you get for your money. I'm curious could you or have you done videos showing how to make watercolors with products that aren't classified as "professional" quality, the trials you mentioned in the beginning of part one? Palettes using makeup or soap pigments, like mica powder, would make great practice palettes. Just a thought. Thanks again and God bless 😊
Hi! Thank you! :) I haven't documented some of the preliminary stuff I mixed, but those included micas and makeup. My only concern would be that it would be hard to evaluate the lightfastness of these materials so the paints would be more of a craft or student range rather than something that could be labeled "professional". It's still a lot of fun, especially for the micas. As for makeup, the powdered kind works better than the cake kind, as that latter one has a binder in it already. :)
I actually kind of love that muddy mauve color that your red and blue made together. It's not what most people would think of when they make purple, but I really like that it's smoky and atmospheric! While you were doing this, I was kind of reminded of smashing herbs in a mortar and pestle. Would it be more comfortable to affix your "grinding stone" to a cylinder to crush with better? Alternatively, adding a small )( shaped thing for your two fingers to grasp may help. I can't think of a better descriptor for what I'm thinking of than to say )(, but I'm hoping that it works. It would be vertical, and have a bit of a stopper at the top so that it stays on your fingers easily. Also, put your honey bottle upside down in a cup or something while you're doing this! I feel frustrated watching you try to wait for honey to hurry itself up out of the bottle, so I can only imagine you feel similarly. Thanks for these tips, I'm really loving seeing not only -the- process but YOUR process.
Thank you!! :)It's a very nice muted purple indeed! I'm glad it made for a mauve rather than a brownish color :) I was thinking about ways to attach my glass marble to a handle of sorts, but I wouldn't know what to use to glue it in place. Might be tricky to wash too. I should try with some more blue tack on it; my hands are not warm enough to make the thing super soft so I could possibly shape it into a more ergonomic shape. Or attach a shape made of airdry clay or something. It's somewhat temporary; it's a long term goal to eventually get a small slab and small muller :) Hahaha sorry about the honey! I will keep a cup handy to put my bottle in next time XD
I probably could! Might be a bit hard to wash though, since I don't know how porous they can be. And it could be hard to work the paste out of the mortar, but it definitely would help with grinding the paint. Perhaps if I found a set made of glass (rather than ceramic or marble), that would work the best?
I tried to make my own paints after I saw your video but they turned out really grainy even if I used pestle and mortar for 10 mins. Even my pestle and mortar turned out smooth but the paint kept being grainy. Yours seems so smooth! How do you do that? I'm so close to blame my gum arabic. It's jacksonsart brand :)
Hi! Some pigments are harder to mull than others, that could be one reason. It might also be that it needs yet more time in the mortar and pestle (some mulling sessions can take up to one hour!). If your gum arabic is liquid and smooth, that's definitely not the issue :)
thanks for the fast reply! the gum arabic is liquid and smooth. The pigments I tried are raw sienna and cobalt blue. I also have quinacridone red and raw umber. I didn't think that it would take one hour! nice way to build arm muscles then :D Do you think adding glycerin would help?
Thank you for a great video, it is much appreciated. A cheap Porcelain mortar would help you a lot in the future. Some art stores sell them, and if you can't find them near your location, you can buy them online. You can get them for around 5-11 USD. :)
Thank you! :) It would've helped a lot, but I ended up going for a real glass muller. I'm fortunate that there's a local store that sells pigment and tools, so I didn't have to order this glass item online. Thanks for the tip! :)
Do you have a good recipe for making the solution from powdered Gum Arabic? The recipe I have just confuses me with The various measurements and ratios they give and examples and.... just too confusing.Please speak slowly, clearly and use small words haha . I have a few sample size packets of natural plant based dyes I want to try making into watercolors. Thank you and I love these mad scientist videos 🤗
I was searching for a video about making your own watercolor paint for a while. Thanks for sharing! I think it would be better if you stick the round side of the marble to your fingers and grind with the flat side. This way you can grind more paint at a time. And the tube that you put your honey in makes me crazy, it is so hard to get the honey out of it, I wanna squeeze it myself while watching hahaha :D
Thanks! :) I would use the marble for it's flat side if it was less uneven. If it was perfectly flat, it would indeed work a lot better. The honey tube has been replaced by a far more efficient jar, it was driving me mad too XD
Just an idea: maybe creating a video title that says something like "improvised pigment grinding" would make it more helpful for other people with this problem to find your video?
Finally!Someone who gives a definite recipe,thank so much. I love you!
This is a good read, too, if you want to make your own paints! www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2020/09/25/making-handmade-watercolours-with-jacksons-artist-pigments/
Thank you for the video & marble for mulling idea. Love the chart and colors! 🎨
After I watched your videos, I made a try and it was soooo interesting. Since I bring earth and stones back from all my trips and transform them in painting. I also began to transform my broken stone jewelry into powder and then I make my paint with or. I have an incredible yellow made of a piece of sulfur collected on a volcano in Japan. My paint box alone is a travel journal ! Thank you for the impulse !
That's so neat!! The sulfur paint must've been quite something! Do you struggle to bring the rocks down to a powdered form?
I love your solution to the glass pestle problem- a glass pebble is easy to find and affordable, so this is great for people casually interested in making homemade paints. The colors you mixed turned out beautifully as well- I love green ochre! Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
Thank you! The pebble worked well for tiny amounts of paints, so it's perfect to experiment with the process and see if a 65$+ muller is worth it :)
What a clever idea with the marble. It must be satisfying to paint with your own paints 😀!
Beautiful colors! Such a clever idea using the glass stone! My favorite color was the mixed green. I'm an earthy kind of person : )
Thank you! :)
This is a very earthy palette overall, but I agree that the green is really nice. It reminds me a bit of the more muted colors of old illustrations (pre-faded? like how some new jeans are pre-ripped? haha!)
Beautiful colors! Thank you for bringing us along as you learn about making your own paints.
Great video Eve! 😆 I'm glad you resolved your Prussian blue issue...it had to be frustrating. The next time you can, have you thought about looking at the cheap glazed white kitchen tiles? We get our out home depot for .89 cents a tile. Completely flat with no edges and smooth...I think they are 4" squared. I use them for ink & wc mixing palettes. I think it would work great with your glass marble idea.
Ooooo, that's a brilliant idea! I did a bit of poking around and I'd have to commute somewhat far to get those tiles, but they are a very good deal (0.29 cents each? in CAD??). I'll keep a mental note to look for them if I end up in that area :) I don't know how they'd fare with the constant grinding, but can't be any worse than it is on my cheap plate XD Thank you!
Eve Bolt - Bolt's Vault bummer you would have to travel so far! Do you think you can maybe order online? I know you would have to buy more, but they work great for so many different things besides just hanging 9n the wall...lol. 😉
Unfortunately, they don't ship the tiles... but I figure that plain white gloss tiles are a staple and shouldn't go away soon, so I hope to grab a few eventually :D They really sound awesome to mix paint!
Using that stone is such a good idea.
Hahaha thanks! :)
If anything, it's a very frugal option :)
I've dealt with similar issues when I tried to make my own paint... So helpful, thank you!
Firstly, I could watch your video for hours! you have comforting calming voice and that music! LOL Secondly, you are a muller genius LOL
Your entire pallette was beautiful! Great eye. Nice vid. I actually enjoyed your blue but only because when it blended with the others, it was eyecatching!
Excellent work and beautiful colors!
Thank you! :)
Wow, they turn out very beautiful, very rich colour, I especially love the yellow/orange mixes. Now you absolutely have to do a lightfastness/opacity test, then a picture test and then a comparison of homemade watercolours and commercial watercolours. :D
Thank you! :D
These are all really good ideas, I will write them down haha. Might be hard to compare with commercial watercolors because these are mostly very opaque and I don't tend to buy opaque paints. I will try but it won't be super conclusive hehe.
Still, you give hope to anyone with DIY abilities. (Not me, I have troubles making a sandwich.)
Maybe you'll end up making them for sale, like RedwoodWillow's. :D
Hahaha, oh dear! I'd love to see one of your sandwiches XD
I wish I could eventually sell some, tbh. I really enjoy the process, but my setup is so amateur right now. I'd need a scale, a grinding slab and a real muller, at the very least. It's on my list though, I just gotta start saving up for that (also, I'm not sure how many people would pay for a paint that can be easily found in a store (like prussian blue), since it's possibly not gonna be much cheaper... IDK how that all works lol)
The point is not being cheaper, it's being handmade. If you go on Etsy and look for handmade watercolors, the price is definitely not going to be lower than a store watercolor (I have seen a set of twelve in a tin box going for over 150USD), but it has the plus side of being handmade so it's going to be a 'new' brand.
(Raise a hand if you love trying out new paints.)
Plus, you support a fellow artist who stands behind their creation. You know your pigment/filler ratio and, using them yourself, you know how to mix the max amount of pigment available to get a rich colour and still get the 'right' watercolor consistency.
I see, fair enough :)
And I have to raise my hand to that, as can attest my paint hoarding problem huhu.
I've seen a few of those handmade paints on etsy and yeah, they don't sell for cheap that's for sure. I understand that it's paying for the craftsperson's time, and a bit for the materials (and I'm ok with that). I just, I don't know, I have to fight with myself over the fact that I'd just want to give it to my friends or nice people and that it'd be a headache to set a pricetag to a paint pan. I'm still gonna look into it all, if only for the fact that my supplies will go bad on me before I even get close to finishing a pan, so I might as well make some extra and make it available to others.
Thanks a lot for your insight, it has given me a lot to think about :D
22:20 it look's like perfect autumn palette
Thank you!! :)
Very fitting that my handmade paints would match with my favorite season... ;)
Loved the Spanish ochre at the beginning. Eve, what is the ring bound pad you are swatching in? I like the texture of it.
Thanks, Peter! :)
I don't remember what book I used to do the test swatches, but the square swatches are made in a Strathmore Visual Journal book, the watercolor one at 140lb ( amzn.to/391uBWr ). Hope this helps! :)
@@EveBolt That's great thanks. I'm looking for a small pad to take on walks, nothing fancy, just to sketch and doodle in. The paper looked quite nice, just how I like it.
That salmon is such a gorgeous color!
Gorgeous color palette, thank you for sharing this, it's inspiring. Seems that so many brands offer the same colors whereas this alternative can provide colors that personally appeal to the artist and appear to be more cost effective in the quantity that you get for your money. I'm curious could you or have you done videos showing how to make watercolors with products that aren't classified as "professional" quality, the trials you mentioned in the beginning of part one? Palettes using makeup or soap pigments, like mica powder, would make great practice palettes. Just a thought. Thanks again and God bless 😊
Hi! Thank you! :)
I haven't documented some of the preliminary stuff I mixed, but those included micas and makeup. My only concern would be that it would be hard to evaluate the lightfastness of these materials so the paints would be more of a craft or student range rather than something that could be labeled "professional". It's still a lot of fun, especially for the micas. As for makeup, the powdered kind works better than the cake kind, as that latter one has a binder in it already. :)
@the bridges It's worth a try! :)
I actually kind of love that muddy mauve color that your red and blue made together. It's not what most people would think of when they make purple, but I really like that it's smoky and atmospheric!
While you were doing this, I was kind of reminded of smashing herbs in a mortar and pestle. Would it be more comfortable to affix your "grinding stone" to a cylinder to crush with better? Alternatively, adding a small )( shaped thing for your two fingers to grasp may help. I can't think of a better descriptor for what I'm thinking of than to say )(, but I'm hoping that it works. It would be vertical, and have a bit of a stopper at the top so that it stays on your fingers easily.
Also, put your honey bottle upside down in a cup or something while you're doing this! I feel frustrated watching you try to wait for honey to hurry itself up out of the bottle, so I can only imagine you feel similarly.
Thanks for these tips, I'm really loving seeing not only -the- process but YOUR process.
Thank you!! :)It's a very nice muted purple indeed! I'm glad it made for a mauve rather than a brownish color :)
I was thinking about ways to attach my glass marble to a handle of sorts, but I wouldn't know what to use to glue it in place. Might be tricky to wash too. I should try with some more blue tack on it; my hands are not warm enough to make the thing super soft so I could possibly shape it into a more ergonomic shape. Or attach a shape made of airdry clay or something. It's somewhat temporary; it's a long term goal to eventually get a small slab and small muller :)
Hahaha sorry about the honey! I will keep a cup handy to put my bottle in next time XD
Oh wow, this looks so fun!
It is! A bit messy and there's a lot of improvisation going on at the moment, but I really enjoy it! :)
I wonder if you could use a pestle and mortar to grind the pigments
I probably could! Might be a bit hard to wash though, since I don't know how porous they can be. And it could be hard to work the paste out of the mortar, but it definitely would help with grinding the paint. Perhaps if I found a set made of glass (rather than ceramic or marble), that would work the best?
So creative!
These colors are gorgeous. Love that mixed green.
Thank you! :)
Do you plan on giving it a try eventually? :D
I would LOVE to. Right now it's a financial issue :( Someday!
How well I understand. Not easy trying to build a freelance job XP
how did the paints store and hold up with your binder formula? that seams to be the most tricky part
I tried to make my own paints after I saw your video but they turned out really grainy even if I used pestle and mortar for 10 mins. Even my pestle and mortar turned out smooth but the paint kept being grainy. Yours seems so smooth! How do you do that? I'm so close to blame my gum arabic. It's jacksonsart brand :)
Hi!
Some pigments are harder to mull than others, that could be one reason. It might also be that it needs yet more time in the mortar and pestle (some mulling sessions can take up to one hour!). If your gum arabic is liquid and smooth, that's definitely not the issue :)
thanks for the fast reply! the gum arabic is liquid and smooth. The pigments I tried are raw sienna and cobalt blue. I also have quinacridone red and raw umber. I didn't think that it would take one hour! nice way to build arm muscles then :D Do you think adding glycerin would help?
Love this!
Thank you! :)
Thank you for a great video, it is much appreciated. A cheap Porcelain mortar would help you a lot in the future. Some art stores sell them, and if you can't find them near your location, you can buy them online. You can get them for around 5-11 USD. :)
Ps If you find one you will also need a small siliconen spatel
Thank you! :)
It would've helped a lot, but I ended up going for a real glass muller. I'm fortunate that there's a local store that sells pigment and tools, so I didn't have to order this glass item online. Thanks for the tip! :)
Do you have a good recipe for making the solution from powdered Gum Arabic? The recipe I have just confuses me with The various measurements and ratios they give and examples and.... just too confusing.Please speak slowly, clearly and use small words haha . I have a few sample size packets of natural plant based dyes I want to try making into watercolors. Thank you and I love these mad scientist videos 🤗
I don't have a recipe to work from powdered gum arabic, sorry!
Eve Bolt - Bolt's Vault , that's ok. I think I got it now, thank God for the internet haha thanks for getting back to me though, much appreciated 🤗
I was searching for a video about making your own watercolor paint for a while. Thanks for sharing!
I think it would be better if you stick the round side of the marble to your fingers and grind with the flat side. This way you can grind more paint at a time. And the tube that you put your honey in makes me crazy, it is so hard to get the honey out of it, I wanna squeeze it myself while watching hahaha :D
Thanks! :)
I would use the marble for it's flat side if it was less uneven. If it was perfectly flat, it would indeed work a lot better.
The honey tube has been replaced by a far more efficient jar, it was driving me mad too XD
used glass, the porcelain is had so stein quimic is no good is reason is only better glass
Just an idea: maybe creating a video title that says something like "improvised pigment grinding" would make it more helpful for other people with this problem to find your video?