this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild

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This is a dark place.

Most art will leave you feeling inspired and maybe even joyful if not a little thoughtful. That won't happen here.

This is a place of paint drinking gremlins with caustic burns on our hands and ink stains on our feet. A dark, damp basement smelling of bleach and burning and bioplastics, of empty wallets and ephemeral passions, of education, of science.

Most art makes people better, but this place can only make you worse, poorer, stained, and consumed by the craft.

Welcome to The Grind and Bind Art Alchemist's Guild.

An artist's community for the kind of people who don't just paint, they grind the pigments themselves. It's for potters who build their own kilns and dig their clay up from the river bed. For weavers who spin their own wool, and, hell, probably know the name of the sheep.

All flavors of inspiration are welcome. Talk about your materials, your processes, post art lore, discuss art-adjacent topics, and share your pieces for questions, praise and critique.

How it goes:

Be kind

Do onto others with kindness and civility. Be curious. Follow the instance rules.

Images:

All posts must have an image, even if you're asking for advice. Post your cat, or your neighbour's cat, whatever. No AI. Please attribute appropriately. Tag NSFW if necessary.

Content

For art, talk about the piece and the process. For media and methods, tell us how you did it. If you're asking for advice, try to be clear and concise with your questions.

Tags Required

[Show and Tell]— Show off your finished or mostly finished pieces.

[Advice Wanted] — "How do you...?" and "Please help, something exploded," kind of thing.

[Info] — Free, online information on DIY media.

[From Scratch] — For all DIY art-making materials. Paints, spun wool, a new kiln, glass blowing studio, bioplastics reactor, etc.

[Discussion] — In the huddle of stained alchemists debate and hugs are equally encouraged.

[Misc] — Anything that doesn't fit in the above categories, but you think still vibes with fhe community.

On Self-Promotion

We all need to put food in the ferret bowl, but let's not talk money here. Do not list prices or link to a personal sales page. Linking to a site that has a sales page is fine as long as that's not the purpose of posting. If someone asks to buy something please take it to DMs. This is a hard rule.

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Banner image taken by Cottonbro on Pexels

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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.

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