August 13, 2025 - August 17, 2025(9am - 5pm)

Botanical Pigments for Paint, Ink, and Pastels

Taught by: Natalie Stopka

Workshop Fee: $700.00

Artwork is made manifest with material choices. Join Natalie Stopka for a five-day exploration of beautiful and sustainable botanical pigments from our dye garden. These rich and subtle colors require thoughtful gathering and careful processing, rooting our practice in conversation with the natural world. Starting with a harvesting excursion, we’ll discuss how to grow, process, and store dye sources. We’ll then extract those dye colors and transmute them into shelf-stable lake pigments and indigo powder. We’ll discuss the chemistry controlling vibrancy and opacity and learn to adapt our basic recipe to participants’ local home garden plants (and weeds!). The ink, pastels, and hand-mulled watercolors we create will color gestural botanical ‘portraits’ of our plant collaborators. Participants will leave with 5+ pigments and 3+ watercolors, inks, and pastels to fold into their own studio practice, as well as the technical know-how to make their own botanical pigments and natural artists’ materials. No previous experience is required.

Skills and Techniques:

  • Ethical foraging guidelines, harvesting, and storage of dye plants
  • How to extract, precipitate, and wash lake pigments
  • Chemistry for artists: the basic chemical underpinnings of lake and indigo pigments
  • Mordant and alkali choices to control lightfastness, vibrancy, and opacity
  • Fermentation extraction of indigo pigment for Maya blue
  • How to make watercolor paints, pigmented writing inks, and pastel sticks for works on paper
  • Riveting stories from the history and artistry of pigment manufacture, from pre-Columbian ritual, through the medieval scriptorium and early modern alchemist’s laboratory, up to the present day

 

Materials Fee: $50 paid directly to the instructor at the time of workshop.

Special Tools or Equipment: We will be spending some time outdoors. Please bring comfortable footwear, sun protection, and insect repellant. Optional: gardening gloves and pruning shears for plant harvesting. A watercolor sketchbook will be provided for swatching and sketching, but you may wish to bring a notebook, as well. Please bring paintbrushes, dip calligraphy pens, or your favorite mark-making tools for exploring our artists’ materials.

Workshop Policies: Please be sure to read our 2025 policies before you register for a workshop which can be found here Workshop Policies

13 in stock

(please choose all meals if you are staying on campus.)
We ask students to purchase a meal plan. Our chef can accommodate most dietary needs so please note any restrictions you want us to be aware of on the checkout page.
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