Natural Earth Pigments were among the earliest recorded materials used by our ancestors to make paint, and their use pre-dates recorded history. 

Starting at least 100,000 years ago, ancient people from all over the world, including Prehistoric People, Egyptians, Native Americans, ancient Buddhists, Medieval monks, and Renaissance masters used earthen pigments to make their paints. Humans on almost every continent ground up earthen clays and minerals and mixed them with a binder such as honey, urine, blood, sap, grease, or oil. This basic technique, with numerous variations, became the prevailing method of oil painting until the Nineteenth century’s introduction of synthetic pigments and petroleum-based paints.

Early painters who foraged for earthen pigments could usually find red, orange, yellow, brown, black, white, and sometimes green as earthen pigments, but blues and purples were more elusive. Each culture used a different technique to make blues and purples. Prehistoric people used manganese ore, the Egyptians used copper frits, the ancient Chinese ground up malachite and azurite, and the Etruscans ground up Lapis Lazuli stones. Our blue is made from a specific type of ochre that turns blue when cooked in the oven.

The Colormen

Before we had ready-made paints and art supplies stores, there were Colormen! They were the “traders” of the paint world starting in the late 17th century and sold artists prepared pigments, pre-mixed oil paints, watercolors, dyes, made brushes, prepped canvases, gums, resins, and more. Before Colormen - during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance - the painter would buy course, raw pigments from apothecaries’ shops (or source them directly from quarries) and grind them into a powder themselves. Either the artist or - if they were wealthy- their apprentice would grind, sift and sieve and mix the pigment with walnut or linseed oil to make oil paint. With the arrival of Colormen, artists were finally liberated from the difficult task of sourcing, manufacturing, grinding and testing all of their pigments, dyes, surfaces and supplies.

When the colormen began selling pre-mixed oil paint, they would sell about 1 oz. of each color tied up in a small piece of cleaned pig bladder. It was about the size of a walnut - a small amount - because more than that would dry up. The artist would pierce the bladder with a pin and squeeze it out onto the palette. They would return to the colormen in 1-2 weeks for more paints. The metal paint tubes that we use today weren't invented until 1834.

Paint in Pig Bladder

Prepared watercolor paints weren't created until 100 years after prepared oil paints. After several decades of development - selling them in clam shells, then discovering how to creates "cakes" and then finally the discovery of adding honey to keep them semi-moist and ease to use, watercolors then became a very popular medium.

These watercolors were sold in square block "cakes" and also in ready-made art boxes prepared by the Colormen. The deluxe boxes were made out of mahogany, and filled with brass hardware, leather linings, equipped with mixing pans, wash bowls, storage tins for chalks or charcoal, trays for their brushes, crayons, scrapers, ink, and paints. These became very popular and were sold all over the world throughout the growing British Empire. Eventually, the colormen set up permanent shops and these gradually evolved into the modern day art supplies stores that we know today.

Colormen were the first to sell “hues” or mixed colors. This revolution allowed them to increase the amount of paint colors that they sold my mixing pigments together to create new ones. The Colormen definitely provided some much desired convenience for artists but it sometimes came at a cost as well. Many professional painters of the time continued to prepare their own pigments, because of fear of the adulteration of the pigments. Expensive pigments like natural ultramarine (from the semi-precious lapis lazuli stone) and vermilion were often adulterated with cheap additives by dishonest Colormen. When mixing “hues” or new colors, they sometimes chose a different pigment or a combination of pigments than what they advertised because the original pigment was too expensive or not available. Another problem with hues is the degradation of “chroma” when pigments are mixed together, because pigments do not act in mixture like single pigments either in color or tone. And another potential problem with pigment mixtures is the interactivity of some pigments that can lead to degradation and not be archival over time.

This movement of convenience, while allowing the artist more freedom, has unfortunately led to our current art supplies practice of buying tubes of pre-mixed paint that have been heavily adulterated with cheap fillers, additives, toxic preservatives, heavy metals, solvents and petroleum-based pigments. 

What Changed?

In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled the first oil producing well in Pennsylvania, and the world was changed forever. In addition to being used for fuel, oil was scientifically studied, and the many chemicals composing petroleum were gradually isolated. New substances that didn’t previously exist in nature were made, like plastics and “modern” paints. A 100,000 year old tradition for making natural earth paints began to slip away.

Producers of these new paints convinced people to change from traditional natural paints by promoting the idea that their new products were more durable (despite the fact that ancient earth paints have lasted thousands of years) and modern. And even though these new paints were more expensive in the beginning, people were persuaded to buy them, and most painters changed their practices soon after.

With this new growth, change, and wealth in the twentieth century, people went through great changes in their relationship with the natural world, in terms of its resources and our spiritual connection with it. Consumerism arose with its insatiable and unsustainable consumption of our planet’s raw materials. I believe we’re now on our way back to the way our ancestors related to the world around them. We’re becoming more aware of the source and properties of our products. To everything there is a reaction, and cultures do change. Let’s take responsibility and act accordingly.

*this is just a small portion of the history of Natural Earth Paint. For more information, visit naturalearthpaint.com.