Links to other posts about this project:
Adventures in Pigment-making, part 1
Adventures in Pigment-making, part 2.1
Adventures in Pigment-making, part 2.2
Adventures in Pigment-making, part 2.3
Hello! We are Roma and Bonnie and this is our honors option project for Dr. Camp’s Literature in the Library class. Roma is an International Affairs and Arabic major with a minor in English, and Bonnie is a Computer Science major with a minor in English.
An important part of our class’s focus on medieval manuscripts is the illumination techniques used to make these manuscripts beautiful. The goal of our particular project is to re-create the pigments used in the Middle Ages using as many medieval techniques as we can (without using toxic substances like lead paint, of course!). We are basically Dr. Camp’s lab rats in that we are trying to come up with dependable recipes for at least five different colors. This process involves experimenting with organic materials (plants, resins, etc) and inorganic materials (clay, minerals, rocks), various types of paint binders (two types of egg tempera as well as gum arabic), and writing supports to make the best-looking illuminations. Once we’ve perfected the recipes, we plan to aid Dr. Camp in a fun workshop for our class and her FYOS class, using these pigments to bring some illustrations to life!
After researching several options, we have narrowed our focus first to the colors red, green, blue since they are the most basic and were commonly used for decorations and rubrication. We also want to attempt to both yellow and purple, which were less common but still found in illuminations (as well as highlighted yellow letters). Finally, we are most excited to experiment with making shell gold, which was a method used for gold leafing in the Middle Ages that combines flakes of gold with a binding called gum arabic to produce a liquid “gold” that we can paint onto the page.
That’s basically it in a nutshell! We are currently collecting our materials and plan to start experimentation very soon, and once we do we will be updating this blog with our progress!