Table of Contents

[Lake Painting with Cochineal and other pre-prepped pigments]

Name: Vivian Mellon Snyder

Date and Time: 

2021.12.06, 10:00 am

Location:Nuss Dorm, New York, New York  

Subject: Lake Painting with Cochineal from Last Class

Sadly, I realized after our in class painting activity that I forgot to take pictures as I went along. The process of turning pigments into paint is pretty chaotic (especially in a cramped dorm) especially since I had to clean as I went along every step. I’ll do my best to describe the process in detail.

I went ahead and uploaded the palette I painted out below:

The three rows are the mediums that we worked with: tempura (egg yolk with a little bit of water mixed in), glaze (the liquid left below stiff peaks of egg whites), and a watercolor medium (gum arabic dissolved in water). The first three columns are the pigments that were mulled into these mediums to create paint: cochineal (a lake pigment that we made in class two days prior), yellow ochre, and azurite. On the last column, I wanted to see how yellow ochre and azurite blended with eachother.

At the beginning of class, I started to prepare my mediums. I started by separating the yolks from two eggs, setting their whites aside for later use.

The tempera wasn’t too difficult to make: I eyeballed a few drops of water from the sink into the bowl of yolks. We were supposed to remove the membrane from the yolk, but after I had broken them up a bit, the membranes seemed to dissolve or disappear into the bowl. I mixed the yolks and water with a fork for a minute or so.

I moved on to making the glaze medium, which took a lot more work. I checked to make sure that no little bits of yolk had made their way into the bowl of whites (from my experience with baking, getting egg whites to form stiff peaks is almost impossible if any fat makes its way into the bowl). I don’t have an electric mixer or even a whisk in my dorm, so I had to make do with a fork. I beat the mixture with a fork, aggressively, for about 20 minutes. I wasn’t able to get truly stiff peaks, a better term would be “stiff hills.” I decided to make do with this since I’d be using the liquid below, anyways. I poured this off into a separate container.

We received 2 grams of gum arabic from the Making and Knowing Lab, which came in a small vial. I can’t remember the exact volume of the vial (maybe 20 mL?), but I filled it up halfway with water. So I believe that the ratio of gum arabic to water was 2 grams to 10 mL. I shook the vial until it looked like the gum arabic had dissolved completely.

At this point, I had all three mediums prepared: tempera, glaze, and watercolor.

We received little candlesticks to use as muller from the Making and Knowing Lab. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a very flat bottom, and were pretty difficult to work with. I was using palette paper (essentially dark grey wax paper for mixing paints) to mull the pigments into each medium.

My process was the same for each of the pigment/medium combinations: I would pour a little pile of pigment onto the wax paper, use a dropper to put two dots of medium onto the pile of pigment, and then I’d use the candlestick to incorporate the pigment and medium together. The palette knife we received from the lab was super helpful for scraping everything back into place as I worked.

Notes on Tempera:

The cochineal blended up pretty well, but had some clumps left that I couldn’t seem to get rid of. I wonder whether this is because I wasn’t using a real, solid muller (where I could put my body weight into what I was doing), or because I made some mistake during the lake making process. I also noticed that the cochineal turned a significantly different color with the tempera. It turned into more of a red tone than a pink one! Interestingly, this didn’t happen to all of my classmates. Ingrid Romero had similar results exclusively with her cochineal/tempera combination, so maybe we use the same type of eggs (Aldi’s, the cheapest in the city! Maybe some kind of growth hormone or other chemical?).

The yellow ochre blended up like a dream! It didn’t take much work to incorporate, and I actually had more luck using the palette knife than the candlestick. The paint had a lot of slip, and felt like mud.

The azurite was really grainy, and I had trouble building much opacity when painting it out. This might be due to the grade of the azurite? I didn’t have a mortar and pestle at this point, but if I did, I would have wanted to try grinding it down further.

Notes on glaze:

The glaze medium handles the pigments very similarly to the yolk. The cochineal felt like a similar consistency, but the color formed with glaze was much more pink. I didn’t notice any color change with the ochre or azurite. These are both inorganic pigments, so maybe some chemical in the organic cochineal pigment interacts with mediums differently?

The yellow ochre still blended up like a dream, though it was more difficult to build opacity. The azurite was still frustrating to handle and paint out because of its graineyness.

I did notice, after drying, a pretty big difference in surface finish. I expected “glaze” to dry with a little shine, but it was quite matte in comparison to the yolk. The yolk didn’t truly shine, but it had a richness and wet look even days later that I associate with oil paint. This makes sense, because of the high fat content of egg yolk.

Notes on gum arabic:

The gum arabic did a really poor job of blending with the cochineal, for some reason. You can see on the sample card that the surface of the cochineal is rough and uneven. I thought this would be the case for yellow ochre and azurite, too, but they actually handled pretty well with gum arabic. In fact, the yellow ochre (which was my favorite pigment to work with) formed it’s brightest color and smoothest finish when used with gum arabic.

Notes on Azurite+Ochre:

The azurite/ochre combination made a fairly flat, swampy green. It’s one of my favorite colors, so I’m not knocking it, but I was hoping I could make a brighter color: you can always tone down vibrance, but you can’t pull it up.

I was interested in seeing how these colors combined because they’re similar to two of the essential colors of my painting practice: lemon yellow and cerulean blue. For most painting projects, the majority of my canvas is covered by some combination of yellow, blue, red, and white. I was really excited to learn how to make paints, and I wanted to see whether I could recreate the essentials of my palette, but they just didn’t combine in a vivid way.