Natural Pigments

Here are recipes that we have tried and used:

Iron-Gall Ink
Gallnuts, 5 grams
Ferrous Sulfate, 1 gram
Gum Arabic, 1 gram
Water, 200 grams

Grind the gallnuts to a fine powder ...

Roger de Piles (October 7, 1635–April 5, 1709) was an art critic, theorist and collector whose important contribution to aesthetic theory rests on his Dialogue sur le coloris ("Dialogue on colours"), in which he initiated his famous defense of Rubens in an argument started in 1671 by Philippe de Champaigne on the relative merits of drawing and color in the work of Titian. In 1668, he published an annotated tranlsation of Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy's De Arte Graphica that ...

Terra-merita is a vegetable color, produced by the decoction of an Indian root (curcuma longa). This reference (Osborn 1849) describes the pigment produced from the plant known in culinary as turmeric. The yellow-orange extract is prepared from the root of the curcuma longa plant by drying and powdering, ...