[Madder lake making ]

Name: Nina Elizondo-Garza; Karen Tompkins, Sümeyye Yar
Date and Time:

2017.[October].[09], [13]:[00][pm]

Location: Chandler Lab
Subject: Making madder lake to create dye/pigment

NEG: I had to prepare for lake making on the most fundamental level imaginable -- I had to look up the meaning of nearly all associated vocabulary. I'll include them below, since I did find them helpful and they might end up helping someone else.

Lake: an insoluble pigment made by combining a soluble organic dye and an insoluble mordant.
Mordant: a substance, typically an inorganic oxide (e.g. a metal oxide) that combines with a dye or stain and thereby fixes it in a material.
Potash: an alkaline potassium compound
Allum (a.k.a. Alum): a colorless astringent compound that is a hydrated double sulfate of aluminum and potassium.
Levigation: grinding a substance into fine powder while wet.

We were all given some notes on how to make madder lake by Naomi and Tianna, and that's the process we followed.

Now I will include the Methodology notes taken by Karen while in the lab:

Subject: Heating and adding potash alum + potassium carbonate (potash)

We were given a 250 mL beaker with 180mL of distilled water in which a polyester netting bag, filled with ground madder root and tied with a string, had rested overnight. The beaker had been covered with plastic wrap to keep debris from falling in it.

First, we removed the plastic wrap from the glass beaker and then turned on the hotplate on to #2.

At 1:01, we put the beaker on the hotplate at setting #2 and inserted a Celsius thermometer. To get an accurate reading, we held the thermometer as we stirred the contents of the beaker with a wooden chopstick. At 1:04, the thermometer reading was 70 Celsius, so we started the timing of the 30 minutes for the extraction of the dye. Soon it jumped to 80 degrees. In order to keep the temperature steady at 70 degrees, we turned the heat down on the hotplate to #1 and took the beaker off the hotplate so the temperature would drop. In two minutes, when it was at 70 degrees again, we put it back on the hotplate.

We had to turn the setting to between #1 and off to keep it below 70. It still kept getting too hot, so we had to take the beaker on and off the hotplate 5 times.

At 1:34, after 30 minutes were up, we took the beaker off the hot plate, pressed the liquid out of the bag using the chopstick, removed the bag and set it aside on a ceramic plate.




At 1:36, we slowly poured the contents of the beaker into an empty 250mL beaker that was fitted on top with a funnel in which a coffee filter was placed.
[

At 1:42, we decided to put a new clean coffee filter in the funnel to hasten the filtering, thinking that there was too much sludge to allow the liquid to filter through the old one.


We weighed 3 grams of potash alum on a scale and put it in a small plastic dish.

Before adding the potash alum to the beaker, the ph was 7 (neutral). We added the potash alum to the dye solution and the ph was 4 (acid).

Next the solution needed to be heated to 80 degrees, as per the instructions. At 1:50, we put the beaker on the hotplate at setting #1 and stirred it vigorously.

While the solution was being heated, we measured 1.2 grams of potassium carbonate in a small plastic dish. We put in120 mL of distilled water in a 600 mL glass beaker. Next we added the potassium carbonate to the beaker of distilled water.

At 1:59, the solution reached 80 degrees. We removed it from the hotplate and set it on the counter. We then began to slowly add the dyestuff solution to solution of potassium carbonate and distilled water, while stirring constantly with a chopstick. Note: we were the only group who added the dye TO the solution, rather than the solution to the dye. We did this because it was how it was described on the handout, and for the sake of science.



A foam filled with bubbles formed on the surface of the substance as we stirred it. We kept stirring to help the reaction along. It felt slightly thicker that water as we stirred and smelled a bit earthy.





At 2:08 The bubbles were no longer forming, so we measured the ph and it was 6.5.
Finally, we covered the beaker with plastic wrap and labeled it twice with masking tape and let it sit overnight.

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Name:
Nina Elizondo-Garza, Karen Tompkins, Sümeyye Yar
Date and Time:

2017.[October].[10], [18]:[00][pm]

Location: Lab
Subject: Dye/pigment extraction

The madder mixture we had let sit overnight had formed a precipitate.

We filtered it again, aiming to collect the filtered material and make that into a pigment. We merely used coffee filters for this which are not great for making pigments.

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Name: Nina Elizondo-Garza, Karen Tompkins, Sumeyye Yar
Date and Time:

2017.[October].[13], [09]:[00][am]

Location: Lab
Subject: Grinding the madder lake

The filters had collected quite a bit of pigment. It was time to scrape it out (delicately, as to not scrape a bunch of fibers from the filter into the mixture), then grind it in a mortar.






We ground the lake until it felt much smoother-- it felt almost mulchy to grind (soft, kind of like soil).



We had been using a marble mortar and pestle and had to be careful when scraping the lake out onto the glass slab. If we scraped too hard with our metal palette knife, some flakes of marble came off as well and contaminated our lake. We needed to mull it again to get it even smoother, and carefully added distilled (I.E. NOT TAP) water using a pipette. Tap water has a bunch of chemicals etc. in it (flouride, chlorine, etc) which could contaminate the pigment.



Mulling felt much smoother than grinding. We knew we had mulled it enough when it felt very smooth with no 'snags' and no grinding sound against the glass. Once it was smooth enough, we scraped it up using a palette knife and separated it into two containers; one for egg, one for oil.




First, we mixed the lake with egg white to make a tempera. We added the white (after it had been well whipped and the foamy bits separated from the glair) with a pipette, also incorporating water so we could get the right texture. We couldn't mix it in advance because the egg begins to dry instantly so we need to be ready to paint the minute it gets mixed. We mixed the egg with the pigment on the slab, mulling it to incorporate it better before putting it in a plastic cup.



It was very watery to paint with --actually, it felt like watercolor. Also, we noticed that if we added too much egg or water, the mixture became bubbly, and lost some of its vibrant color (in other words, it dilutes).

Egg yolk tempera had a different texture.





It was way stickier, more elastic --like an egg yolk. The paint was much glossier, which makes sense --we thought it was similar to using an egg wash for baking bread. It was a deeper read, but also harder to spread. I tried using a big brush for it and it just DID NOT take. A big brush actually 'peeled off' the previous layers. It clung to the brush as well.

The oil paint was the easiest to blend, and it felt more like paint that anyone could buy at a modern art supply shop.



We mixed it right on the slab, in an area separate to the egg areas since we needed to keep it separate from the water.






More careful application of the egg yolk pigment. Both egg mixtures are difficult to blend, and the yolk 'stretches' when painted on, then retracts. It has an almost elastic quality. We also observed that, using the egg yolk, we could still see the paint layers underneath. Also, it was shinier, and absorbed better on the gesso board than on the card.



Creative application of the oil paint on gesso board. The squares above the one being painted in the image include our experiments with egg white and egg yolk --note the one where the paint is peeling off? That's what happens when you use a big brush with egg yolk tempera.

The oil paint was much easier to use; it blended well and we could easily use a big brush. It looks and feels, according to one of our post-docs, like old ketchup. It was very easy to scrape up from the slab and was very dark and shiny.