this post was submitted on 10 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.

Icon drawn by Wren

Banner image taken by Cottonbro on Pexels

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This is the most vivid yellow I've made so far. It only took the peels of about ten lemons to make 2x this (there will be much, much less when it dries.) I used the juice 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.

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