What is traditional pigment Making?

 Pigment making is one of the oldest human crafts, predating written language by tens of thousands of years. Before the industrial era transformed colour production into a chemical manufacturing process, every artist's palette was assembled from materials drawn directly from the earth — from mineral veins, from plants, from insects, from the residues of metalworking. In Britain, this tradition reached its peak between the 16th and 18th centuries, when a network of workshops, dye-houses, and colour merchants supplied painters, decorators, manuscript illuminators, and textile makers with handmade pigments of extraordinary variety and depth.

Today, that knowledge survives in only one working workshop in Britain: The Colour Makers House in Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria, where master pigment alchemist Mark Hilsden produces traditional colours using techniques unchanged since the medieval period.

 Pigment making is one of the oldest human crafts, predating written language by tens of thousands of years. Before the industrial era transformed colour production into a chemical manufacturing process, every artist's palette was assembled from materials drawn directly from the earth — from mineral veins, from plants, from insects, from the residues of metalworking. In Britain, this tradition reached its peak between the 16th and 18th centuries, when a network of workshops, dye-houses, and colour merchants supplied painters, decorators, manuscript illuminators, and textile makers with handmade pigments of extraordinary variety and depth.

Today, that knowledge survives in only one working workshop in Britain: The Colour Makers House in Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria, where master pigment alchemist Mark Hilsden produces traditional colours using techniques unchanged since the medieval period.

 A pigment is a finely ground coloured material that, when mixed with a binder such as linseed oil, gum arabic, or egg yolk, produces paint. Unlike dyes, which dissolve into a liquid to stain a material, pigments are insoluble particles suspended in their medium. This distinction matters because it determines how a colour behaves on a surface — how it sits, how it ages, how it reacts to light over centuries.

Pigments are broadly grouped into two families: earth pigments, derived from mineral-rich soils and rock formations, and synthetic pigments, which require chemical processing to create. Traditional pigment-making encompasses both categories, but the chemical processes employed before industrialisation were themselves forms of craft knowledge — carefully observed, carefully recorded, and passed from master to apprentice.

The simplest and most ancient pigments are the ochres — iron-rich clays that produce colours ranging from pale yellow to deep orange-red depending on their iron content and whether they have been heated. The ochres available in the North Pennines and the Lake District include some of the richest deposits in England, and these are among the materials used at The Colour Makers House today.

Raw sienna is an unheated ochre with a transparent golden quality; burnt sienna is the same material calcined in a kiln, which deepens the iron oxide to a richer reddish-brown. Umber is a darker earth pigment containing both iron and manganese oxide, found extensively in parts of the Lake District. Raw umber and burnt umber have been staple colours on English palettes since at least the Tudor period.

These are not merely historical curiosities. Earth pigments have properties that synthetic equivalents cannot replicate: transparency, granulation, and a warmth of tone that reflects the specific mineralogy of their source. When you grind and use an ochre gathered from a hillside in the Eden Valley, the colour carries a quality unique to that landscape.

[More articles about Ochres - Eight Thousand Years | Mendip Yellow Ochres | Clearwell Caverns | Red Sails | Norfolk Yellow Ochre | North England Ochre | Bideford Black ]

Beyond the earth pigments lies a more complex tradition of colour-making that requires chemical transformation of metals and minerals. These are the pigments that gave the medieval palette its most remarkable blues, greens, and whites — and they are the colours that require the most knowledge, patience, and care to produce.

Verditer, one of England's distinctive blue-green pigments, is produced when copper reacts with nitric acid in the presence of chalk or limestone. Historically, English verditer was a by-product of silver refining: when silver was extracted from argentiferous copper ores using nitric acid (aqua fortis), the copper-rich waste solution was treated with chalk to precipitate the vivid blue-green carbonate. The North Pennines, one of England's most important historic mining regions, produced both copper and lead ores that fed these refining processes.

Blue bice is a closely related pigment, with a deeper, more violet-toned blue, also derived from copper carbonate. Prussian blue, discovered accidentally in a Berlin workshop around 1704, is produced by reacting iron salts with potassium ferrocyanide — a reaction that can be replicated using traditional methods and produces one of the most lightfast blues available.

Lead white, the dominant white in European painting from antiquity to the 19th century, is produced by the slow corrosion of metallic lead in the presence of acetic acid vapour and carbon dioxide. The traditional Dutch or stack process involved burying lead sheets in spent tanner's bark or horse manure alongside pots of vinegar, creating an atmosphere of acetic acid and CO₂ that slowly converted the lead surface to basic lead carbonate. The result — when ground fine enough — is a warm, opaque white of extraordinary covering power. 

To find out more about metal-based pigments, here are some in-depth articles - [ Bird Droppings to Blues (Bice)  | Metallic Heart | Elusive Blues and Greens | Right White for Buildings | Alchemy of Lead White | Staple White of Western Art  ]

 A distinct category of traditional colour is the lake pigment: a dye source fixed onto a mineral substrate (usually alum, chalk, or tin compounds) to produce a paint-ready pigment. The most celebrated lake pigment in English art history is cochineal lake, made from the dried bodies of the Dactylopius coccus insect, which fed on cacti in Mexico and Peru and was introduced to European trade networks by Spanish colonisers in the 16th century.

Cochineal produces carminic acid, which yields a range of colours from scarlet to crimson depending on the mordant used. Scarlet carmine is made by fixing the dye onto tin compounds to produce a vivid, slightly orange-red; the deeper crimson lake is precipitated with alum. Both forms were used extensively in English portrait painting of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Other lake pigments include madder lake (from the root of Rubia tinctorum), weld yellow (from the plant Reseda luteola), and indigo lake (from the fermented leaves of Indigofera tinctoria). All can be produced using traditional methods at The Colour Makers House, connecting the workshop to global trade networks that once carried these materials from Peru, India, and the Mediterranean to English artists' palettes.