Elizabethan Red Lakes

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Cochineal begins its life on the bench as nothing more than dried insects. 

The first transformation is the simplest: crushed and extracted, they yield a dye bath, a deep red liquid holding the colour that once made captured Spanish cargoes worth fighting over. From there, the process becomes genuinely alchemical. Working from that single dye bath, we can modify the colour across a real range, from a bright red through to a deep purple, though with varying degrees of success, since the exact shift depends on conditions that change subtly from one batch to the next. 

Precipitation follows, and it is the most unpredictable stage of all. Handled one way, it can foam up explosively the moment it begins; handled another way, it settles into a fine precipitate that can take weeks to fully form. Either way, nothing about this step can be rushed, and no two sessions behave quite the same. Once the precipitate has settled, it is dried down into a solid cake, the material growing more workable as the water slowly leaves it. 

The final step is grinding: the dried cake is worked down into a true pigment, fine enough to bind and use as paint. A hand-ground pigment handles differently to anything from a tube, and it is this ground colour you will mix with egg tempera and paint with before the session ends. 

Because each of these stages takes days or weeks to complete on its own, we bring vessels from every stage to the bench already underway, in the best tradition of Blue Peter: here is one we made earlier. In a single session, you move through the whole transformation by hand, from dried insect to dye bath, from bright red to deep purple, from foam to precipitate, from cake to ground pigment, and finally, from pigment to paint on the page.