In this episode of But Why we're learning how to make paint from an artist who wild-crafts his own pigments, and we're visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to learn about the value of art.
There are a lot of different ways that paint is made. If you're painting your house you're probably using industrial paint that was made in a very big factory. There are lots of chemicals involved in making the paints we typically use for things like houses or cars or other things that need to be resistant to rain and dirt and kids drawing on the walls!
There are also paints used in art projects. Some of these are also made in big factories. But you can make your own paint with just a few household items. A lot of the recipes include food coloring as one of the ingredients you need. Well, that's kind of cheating if you really want to make your own paint, because food coloring is already a blended up pigment, the thing that makes paint whatever color it is.
So we thought we'd ask a guy who makes his art materials from scratch for a lesson in how you can make your own paint from start to finish!
"How do you make paint?" - Addison, 5, Edmonds, WA
Nick Neddo is an artist in Vermont. At his home studio he has all kinds of supplies for making art, and he makes most of them himself. So his paintbrushes might be wood from a local tree for the handle and the hair of a deer for the brush! His process for making paint is pretty cool.
Click through the slide show above to see how Neddo makes paint!
"People have been making paint for thousands of years from various sources of pigment. Pigment is what makes the paint colorful. It's the little particulate that gives the paint its color. Basically you can break it down to getting pigment from rocks or from plants, fungi even. I'm really interested in using rocks to make paint," Neddo said.
He gathers them up and puts them into his granite mortar and pestle: that's a stone bowl with another stone that you use like a hammer. He smashes the rocks into pieces, then grinds them into powder.
Then he carefully pours the powder — the pigment — into a jar with a lid.
"The next step is to add a little bit of water to it. I want to use just enough to cover the pigment. The next step is to put the lid on and shake it vigorously. The larger of those pigment particles, the heavier ones, those are settling down to the bottom of the jar first. All of the fluid that's floating around in the top of the jar, I'm going to pour that into another jar and save it.
"From there you have a nice pigment, and you can add another ingredient which is your binder. The job of the binder is to keep the pigments suspended in the solution as you're mixing it with water. You need a binder to keep those little particles floating in there rather than just having them settle to the bottom. The binders can be egg, they can be glue, they can be honey, a wide variety of things. If you want to make oil paint, your binder would be some kind of oil. It can be as simple as spitting in it."
— Artist Nick Neddo
Nick Neddo makes a lot of other art materials too, not just paint. While we were in his studio he showed us a few other things he has made over the years, like pens and paint brushes.
Listen to the full episode to hear about that.
We also pay a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to talk about the value of art. What makes art priceless to one person and worthless to another?
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