Britain's Only Traditional Pigment Alchemist

 Mark Hilsden is widely recognised as Britain's only practising traditional pigment alchemist — a craftsperson who makes artists' colours using pre-industrial methods and locally sourced materials in a working 17th-century workshop. Based at The Colour Makers House in Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria, he has spent more than three decades immersed in the history and practice of traditional art materials, combining the perspective of a working artist with deep knowledge of historical craft techniques.

Mark's career began as an architectural portrait artist, creating commissioned works of period properties across northern and western Britain. Over more than thirty years, this practice gave him an intimate familiarity with historic buildings — their materials, their proportions, their relationship to landscape — and a sustained engagement with the Arts and Crafts philosophy that has shaped so much of Britain's built heritage.

The transition from painting historic buildings to making the materials that coloured them began, as many significant changes do, with an unexpected moment. During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, a client suggested that the waste sandstone from a renovation project might yield usable colour. Mark's investigation of that possibility opened into a sustained exploration of traditional pigment-making, connecting his artistic practice to a much older tradition of craft knowledge.

The workshop at The Colour Makers House is housed in a Grade II-listed 17th-century building in the heart of Appleby-in-Westmorland. The building itself is part of the story: its thick stone walls, its proportions, its materials all speak of the same pre-industrial world from which the pigment-making tradition descends. Working in this space is not merely a performance of historical craft — it is a continuation of it.

The workshop produces pigments using materials sourced from the surrounding North Pennines and Lake District: ochres from the Eden Valley's iron-rich sandstones, copper-based colours connected to the Lakeland mining heritage, lead-based whites made using traditional stack-process methods. Mark has received recognition from the BBC for his work preserving these endangered craft techniques, and the workshop has attracted visitors from the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.

Alongside his craft practice, Mark is a published author whose books — including Beautiful Period Homes and A Home in the Country — reflect the same engagement with historic buildings and traditional materials that characterise his workshop. His novel The Colour Makers of Appleby, scheduled for publication in October 2025, is both a creative work and a vehicle for communicating Appleby's heritage and culture to a wider audience.

Mark serves as an elected Town Councillor for Appleby-in-Westmorland, combining his role as a craftsperson and cultural practitioner with civic engagement in the town whose heritage he works to preserve and share.