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MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Inspiration
One of the main inspirations for my project was an artist on TikTok named Elizabeth Marchetti. She makes videos of her process and teaches others how to make their own paints from scratch. She makes many of her paints using store-bought pigments, but she also has videos where she makes paints from natural ingredients.
Attention Management
In class this semester we talked about a handful of time and attention management strategies. One of these strategies is called the Pomodoro technique. To do the Pomodoro technique, you set a timer for chunks of time to do work with small breaks in between and a longer break once you’ve done a couple run throughs. For example, many people will set work timers for 20-30 minutes and break timers for 5-10 minutes. This allows you to balance work and taking breaks and the alarms keep you on track to get things done. I used this technique during the research part of my project, and it helped keep me on track by giving me short, manageable work times.
TECHNIQUES
RESEARCH
My main research techniques were my organizational strategy and the Pomodoro technique I mentioned above. To begin my research process, I came up with broad questions to guide my research. Once I had collected some of my research, I created more specific guides that helped me to determine my three topics. I then organized my notes by creating a section for each of my three topics and sorted my notes into those.
PAINT-MAKING
The details of my paint-making process are in the sections below!
WATERCOLOR
For my watercolor paintings, I used a mixture of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. Wet-on-wet painting is when you soak the paper in water and then apply your watercolor to it. This gives the color a more diffused look and allows you to do washes. Wet-on-dry technique is when you apply your watercolor paint to dry paper. This allows you to create more precise shapes and crisper lines.
PAINT-MAKING
Here is the process that I used to create all of my paints. My process is very similar to the processes my resources used, so I have linked the website below.
Making the base:
Step 1- Add the Gum Arabic powder and distilled water to a jar. The proportions I used were 1:1, but you can play around with those proportions to find a consistency you prefer. I specifically used 1 tablespoon of each in my mixture.
Step 2- Add the vegetable glycerin to your mixture. I used about a teaspoon in mine, but again you can play around with the proportions to get a consistency you like.
Step 3- Mix ‘em up! I started by mixing it with a fork to get most of the lumps out and then gave it a good shake with the lid on. The goal with mixing it is to get it as combined as possible, but it’s okay if it still has lumps in it.
Step 4- Put it in the refrigerator for about 2 days. At the end of these 2 days, it shouldn’t have any lumps left but if it does, do your best to mix it again and let it sit for a little while longer.
Making/Collecting Pigments:
Step 1- Collect your materials. There’s a lot of potential materials that could make nice pigments including spices, flowers and plants, or even eyeshadows (for the sake of this project, I stuck with the natural ingredients, but I will 100% be making sparkly eyeshadow paint in the future).
Step 2- If you’re using plants and flowers, you’ll need to give them time to dry out or dehydrate them. Personally, I used a dehydrator to speed up the process.
Step 3- Use a mortar and pestle to grind your pigment into a fine powder. Do this with all of your materials even if you think it’s already a fine powder. Flowers and plants tend to take a while to grind down, but the good news is you’ll be very buff afterwards :)
Step 4- Use a sifter to get rid of large particles. I recommend that you sift it one final time once you think you’ve got a fine pigment. The finer the powder you get the smoother the paint will turn out.
Making Paint:
Step 1- Set up your station with all of your tools and materials. You will need your base, pigments, glass mixing surface, muller, and mixing tools. If you can’t get a muller (they tend to be quite expensive), I used a metal coffee tamper instead.
Step 2- Add equal parts pigment and base to the glass surface. You can either measure this exactly or eyeball it, just be careful not to add too much of the base right away.
Step 3- Mix. I used a small metal paint mixing tool to initially combine the base and pigment and then went in with the muller. You want to continue mixing and mulling until the base no longer separates from the pigments (you can see this at the edges).
Step 4- Put your paint into whatever container you choose. You can either put them into air-tight containers or let them dry out in cakes (I dried mine out).
PAINT-MAKING
End Results
The overall paint-making process was interesting to say the least. One of the main things I learned from this project is that plants can be liars. You think you’re going to get one color from a flower but then it’s completely different. For example, I collected these dark red leaves from a maple tree and the paint looks red in the container, but when you actually paint with it, it applies red and dries a dark grey-green. Basically, plants are deceptive.
Making the paints was very fun though. The rest of the process was relatively easy, albeit time consuming. It took a while to grind the flowers and plants into pigments, but once I had them, mixing the paint was simple. I’m quite proud of my final paints although there are definitely things I would change for the next time I tried this. A few of my paints turned out grainy, which I would fix by trying to grind and sift them more. I also want to try using different materials for pigments, such as eyeshadow which I mentioned in the previous section.
PAINT-MAKING TIMELAPSE
This is a short, simple video that shows me mixing the pigment and the base together. The pigment I used for this video is the butterfly pea powder.