29 recipes spanning every great medium in history — from cave-painting ochre to Renaissance egg tempera to peeling barn-red milk paint.
The original paint — colored dirt and tree sap.
The medium of Byzantine icons and early Renaissance panels.
Sour-milk paint — the medium of barns, posters and Mexican muralism.
The classic American farmhouse paint — simple, breathable, biodegradable.
Pigments mixed into lime, painted into wet plaster — Pompeii, Giotto, the Sistine Chapel.
Candle soot, ground with sap and honey.
Crushed berries thickened with chalk for opaque color.
Three paints, ten minutes, from your spice rack.
Vine charcoal or burnt bone, ground into a wash.
Make your own iron oxide — the oldest red on Earth.
Crushed chalk or oven-dried eggshell, ground to silk.
True blue from fermented leaves, dried into a cake.
The royal red of Aztec textiles and Renaissance robes — from a cactus beetle.
The medium of Van Eyck and Rembrandt — pigment ground into pressed flax oil.
The pit you usually throw away makes a startling pink paint.
Free pigment from the papery skins everyone throws away.
The same dye that stains your hands at harvest, in a paint pan.
A working pH-indicator paint — purple, pink with vinegar, blue with soda.
Brilliant crimson straight from a roasted root.
Tannin-rich acorns plus a splash of iron — a foraged grey-black.
Backyard weeds, simmered into a gentle yellow paint.
Scoop a fistful of riverbank clay — it is already pigment.
A broken brick is fired iron-rich clay — already a finished pigment.
Pluck a chunk of charred hardwood from a cold fire pit — it is pure pigment.
Genuine green dirt — the underpainting of every Renaissance face.
A fingertip of soft white from a chalk outcrop — millions of fossil shells.
Black crusts on bog stones and stream rocks are manganese — a true mineral black.
The bright yellow streak in a fresh roadcut is iron-rich earth — paint it straight.
Theatre scenery and historic interior walls — gentle, breathable, peelable.