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Indigo

Indigo is a hot topic right now, hot in the dyeing community, and hot among scholars who work on dyes.  I was recently at a conference on colors where half … Read More

Prussian Blue

(Continued from Prussian Green and The Wind Furnace) Modern Prussian Blue is light-fast, chemically inert, and chromatically rich, so much so that it is still on modern painters’ palettes, for … Read More

The Wind Furnace

Among Sir Isaac Newton’s papers are descriptions of a surprising number of furnaces.  Newton is best-known for the laws of physics which still bear his name; his three laws comprise … Read More

Prussian Green

My reading these days includes a lot of Robert Boyle’s two essays on failure: “Of the Unsuccessfulness of Experiments,” and “Of Unsucceeding Experiments.”  They are similar in title, but not … Read More

Gum Arabic

I’ve taken a break from making more pigments to transform some of those pigments into watercolors—tiny, almost gemlike nuggets ready to be mixed with water and applied to paper.  I … Read More

Lake

I’ve started working on a category of pigments called “lakes,” a name for insoluble pigments made from organic dyes.  Virtually everything in nature gives some sort of color; it’s just … Read More