The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild

This is the most vivid yellow I've made so far. It only took the peels of about ten lemons to make 2x this. I used the juice for to shift the colour in my red cabbage dye, and to make a zesty screwdriver.

Lemon juice is a slightly lower PH than cleaning vinegar, so it doesn't take as much.

I should have taken a pic of my tests when I filled a handful of small jars with the lemon dye to determine which chemicals to use. The combination of aluminum phosphate(alum) and sodium carbonate(washing soda) turned it red, but aluminum sulphate and washing soda didn't shift the colour at all.

Copper mordant bleached it a tiny bit and iron mordant turned it brown.

This page provides an “in-progress” alphabetical list of plants that I use successfully to eco print textiles and paper as described in my blog posts. The plants are garden-grown or foraged locally (in the Ottawa, Ontario area), with an emphasis on native plants for all North America, especially the north-east and that can also be grown in other parts of the world. I have given the common names in English and French, plus the scientific (Latin) names, noting briefly colours most often obtained in eco prints with alum mordant.

A superb and sciencey documentation of one person's journey printing with natural materials. There are quite a few pages on the site on the subject of natural dyes and eco-printing, including a how-to on raw material printing.

By rummaging in old libraries, I uncovered several ancient recipes for pastels. The authors most certainly had uses in mind other than street painting, but they served as a starting point. These were personal formulas based on the experiences and intuitions of the artists who wrote them down. They called for mixing natural pigments with a range of comestible binders, such as sugar, milk, fig’s milk, beer, ale, and honey. Orwell reports that pavement artists bought their colors in the form of powder and worked them into cakes using condensed milk as the binder. The old recipes simply consisted of ingredient lists, without mixing proportions, apart from the occasional spoonful or cupful of an ingredient (although there was no standardization for the size of a spoon or cup).

Did you know that "Master" is a legitimate designation? This guy backs up the title with the amount of research he puts into every part of his art, down to reseaeching the historical formulas for mandonnari pastels.