All Posts By

jyotsna

Natural Dye Garden Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

What’s happening in my Dye garden?!-Part III

28th May 2022

You can create a wonderful natural dye garden on a balcony even if you don’t have a garden or access to a community garden space.  In this blog post, I’ll share the set-up and updates of my natural dye garden, which I started on the balcony of our new apartment earlier this year alongside an allocated garden space. The microclimate of a balcony garden differs from that of the ground. Consider the following factors before starting a balcony garden: space,…

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Handmade Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

How to Make Watercolor Binder

17th May 2022

A step-by-step guide to making gum Arabic based watercolor binder for handmade watercolors The use of Gum Arabic as a binder dates back to ancient times.  The presence of Gum Arabic increases watercolor brilliancy, gloss, and transparency, giving greater depth to each color. It slows down the drying time of paint, and can also be used for controlling spread when painting wet-on-wet. Watercolor paint is made by dispersing pigments of any colour in different proportions with acacia gum binder. The…

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Natural Dye Garden Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

What’s happening in my Dye Graden?!-Part II

12th May 2022

Two weeks ago, I went to tend my allocated garden plot to transplant saplings of dye plants into the Earth. The field was readied for gardening five weeks ago, but what awaited me was a jungle of weeds instead of a prepped garden plot. The rainy weather a week prior helped the seeds hidden in the soil, patiently waiting for the ideal conditions to sprout. All of the efforts to prepare the garden bed had been for nought. Lesson learned…

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Natural Dye Garden Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

What’s happening in my Dye garden?! – Part I

27th April 2022

For long as I can remember, I have always wished to have a small garden patch where I could grow my own food and botanical colors for my creative practice. Even though I have previously grown food on a balcony, this is the first time I am growing natural dye plants for making lake pigments. I’ll share my methods, challenges and learnings in growing natural dye plants in the blog series “What’s happening in my Dye Garden”! Cultivating plants and…

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Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

How to make Lake Pigments

10th January 2022

I’d planned to write this blog for a long time but hadn’t gotten around to it until now. In this post, I’ll show you how I make lake pigments from frugal resources. I began experimenting with creating lake pigments five years ago and the unpredictability of this process really excites me! Lake pigments are an excellent way to get the most out of every drop of natural color by converting it into a pulverised state with a long shelf life.…

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For children Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

A peep in to natural watercolor paint-making workshop for Children!

11th October 2021

Nature offers us a glorious abundance of a vibrant and bedazzling palette of rainbow colors. It is easy to forget that not long ago, all dyes and paints were made using natural resources. Not to mention natural colors are safe, eco-friendly, and sustainable, and it gives pure joy to collaborate with nature to express our creative inner-self.  This year during early summer, I finally got a chance to conduct a long-due natural watercolor paintmaking workshop for children titled “Colors of Nature…

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Natural pigments, watercolor paints, plant dyes & inks

Masterclass & Interactive workshop: “Radically Sustainable Watercolors”

22nd May 2021

Do you want to learn to make sustainable and natural non-toxic watercolors?   Are you an artist or someone like me who uses watercolors as a medium of expression?  Do you want to create something that doesn’t harm our environment? Well, you need not come up with some eco-friendly innovation to create art. Throughout the ages, nature has been an apothecary of arts. One can obtain myriad hues of beautiful pigments from nature. Natural pigments are the purest form of color…

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