Making Natural Paints & Inks

Natalie Stopka is an artist and educator focused on the material history of color and sustainable studio practice. She captures material and elemental interactions in her collaborative, experimental art practice. Her drawings and prints incorporate plant dyes and historical pigments, which provide a seasonally evolving vocabulary of texture and color. Natalie’s freelance studio and dye garden are located in Yonkers, New York. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published spring 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice. After the rooks have feasted on the riverbank, the empty mussel shells become paint palettes. The seasonally moulted flight feathers of local swans and geese become quill pens and brushes. Chalk dug out from their setts by badgers is left in piles in the woods, where she gathers it and take it home to make gouache. Caroline makes paints from foraged earth pigments from around the UK, and art tools and inks from natural, wild, and found materials such as oak galls, rusty nails, elderberries, bay leaves and cherry tree gum. The natural fluctuations of materials and the botanical ink stains or ochre paints forming prepared grounds on paper, all suggest forms with which she works.

Lucy Mayes is an artist and pigment maker & researcher working in London and Hampshire. Her work as ‘London Pigment’ uses urban waste stream materials to make recycled pigment. Her practice is centred on the use of unusual, surprising or esoteric raw materials to make colour as a way of documenting events or ‘happenings’. Verdigris made from copper wire stripped from burnt-out mopeds, soot and ash from park fires and construction rubble have all been used in her work to make new pigments. Her colour-making practice centres on creating sustainable pigments from anthropocene waste streams. She works in the capacity of pigment/colour consultant and has worked with Neptune Interiors Ltd, Jaguar Land Rover, Royal Cornwall Museum, V&A, Kew Gardens on pigment projects. She previously worked as product developer and pigment specialist at renowned colourman L.Cornelissen & Son where she developed their historical pigment archive. She teaches pigment making at institutions nationally and hopes to re-orientate our connections to colour; through the creation of intimate relationships with matter formed through embodied making.

Carolyn Sweeney is an artist and art teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She uses mineral and botanical color on paper, mostly foraged from public roadways and the compost piles of neighbors. Carolyn has a BA in Fine Art from Whitman College and later studied textiles at Oregon College of Art and Craft. It was in the midst learning to weave and spin that Carolyn first encountered natural color, using natural dyes for her textile projects. After having a child she went back to working on paper, and started making botanical inks from her natural dye plants. From there she discovered mineral pigments and making her own watercolor paints. She now uses a variety of handmade artist materials- watercolors, lake pigments, pastels, egg temperas, soy wax crayons, and others that defy neat categories. She is also a beginning papermaker, and paper nerd. 

Carolyn’s own art practice seeks to center these natural materials as co-creators, finding inspiration in the relationships between humans, plants, and the very earth beneath our feet. 

Greta Desirèe Facchinato (IT/LU) is a research-based multidisciplinary artist and designer. She holds a Masters in Artistic Research from KABK Den Haag (NL) and a Batchelors in Visual and Performance Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (IT). Through the crossflow of different mediums and the investigation of daily life encounters, gestures, and materials her practice invites us to experience matter from an embodied awareness. She runs a studio focused on research and sustainable education through natural materials, illustration and creative workshops. In 2021 with her project Colour is Alive she researched organic ink making for screen printing. Since then she is been working with the knowledge of color and the interconnection with our environment through the practice of making sustainable ink for printing techniques.

About Caroline Nicolay

Caroline Nicolay is an archaeologist and heritage interpreter specialising in bringing historic techniques and crafts to life, from paint making in early history to open-fire cooking using clay pots. Her research was focusing on Iron Age wall paintings and evolved towards historic and natural building techniques.

Mainly working with museums and heritage sites, she has been running courses for a number of years, hoping to share widely some techniques that are both thousands of years old and increasingly popular in our 21st century as sustainable arts & building practices. www.pariogallico.com 

Elise Wagner is an internationally exhibiting encaustic painter, printmaker, educator, and creator of PrintWax, an innovative encaustic collagraph process that expands the possibilities of wax as a printmaking medium.

Originally from Jersey City, New Jersey, Wagner is based in Astoria, Oregon, where her studio at Pier 11 hovers over the Columbia River. For more than three decades, she has worked with beeswax, resin, pigment, oil, and printmaking processes, developing richly layered surfaces that explore geology, mapping, water, atmospheric phenomena, and the relationship between human experience and the natural world.

Wagner has taught encaustic painting and printmaking nationally and internationally and currently teaches workshops from her Pier 11 studio, which also hosts workshops for visiting and local artists. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Ford Family Foundation.

Her approach to teaching emphasizes understanding your materials from the ground up. By learning to make the medium and colors themselves, students gain greater freedom to experiment, troubleshoot, and develop a palette and visual language that are distinctly their own.