4. BioChromes¶

References & Inspiration¶

Here are some projects that I follow and that are realted to natural pigments and dyes. Making my own pigments is a dream of mine and I'm really interested in their usage in visual arts.

Claudy Jongstra makes large-scale textile artworks and architectural installations.She follows a radical soil-to-soil philosophy, her colours come from her biodynamic farm
Color Amazonia is a research project of Susana Mejía focused on 11 dye plants and their recipes from the Amazon region.
Wild Pigment Project is a project founded by Tilke Elkins that connected artists to the land through locally foraged pigments, promoting ecological balance and a regenerative, ever-evolving creative community.

Research¶

This week we have experimented with natural dyes (plants and insects), mordants, modifiers, bacterias and lake pigment. I have done some simple natural dyes during my Master, so many things were new for me.

Tools¶

- Samples: Cotton-viscose, wool
- Plant or insect based pigments
- Weighing scale
- Utensils: spoons, whisks, ladle, fennels, strainers, mortar
- Stainless steel pots, bekers, boels, jars

Preparing the samples!¶

Dye Material¶

This are the natural elements we used!

Madder, Rhubarb and weld need to hydrate for a few hours before use. They are quite stiff and dry.

Dye Baths¶

Here we are with our simmering pots. * needs to be hydrated before. You can see that in many case we had a main pot and little pots or beker where we added modifiers: iron, cidric acid, copper. We have made quite strong bye baths, circa 150% of WOF, so we could overdye and make lake pigments afterwards.

Indigo¶

Indigo requires a slightly different process.

Lake pigment¶

We also prepare lake pigments, which are non-solubile pigments obtained by precipitation caused by an inert binder, usually a metallic salt.

Our pigments!

Bacterial Dye¶

tba...

Outcomes¶

Now that our samples are dry we can procede with documentation and taking pictures.

We decided to create a digital shared documentation and then split each sample in 6, so each one of us could document in their own style. Here is the slides we made using Miroboard! Here is the PDF in case the slides below are not accessible anymore!

The BioChromes booklet!

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I prepared a little pdf to document the colours we obtained. You can check it out here! The digital booklet displays square color samples, while the physical version features folded pages that you can turn to see all the shades. I decided to catalog everything based on the plant/insect and the colors they produce, whether in their neutral or modified form

My yarns¶

I also dyed some of my cotton yarns. I scoured, mordated and fixated them as discribed above for the cotton-viscose sample.

this is what I made with them!

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