From Plant to Pigment: How to make your own vibrant inks, pastels and paints
By Natalie Stopka
Extent: 176 pp
Format: Hardback
Illustrations: Illustrated in colour
Publication date: 2025-10-14
Size: 23.0 x 18.3 cm
ISBN: 9781837760671
A complete guide to extracting vivid pigments from plants - and making your own professional-grade paints with them.
A manual full of recipes for artists to create their own pigments, paints, and pastels from botanical sources.
Natalie Stopka is an artist and educator known for her explorations of handmade, homegrown pigments. In From Plant to Pigment she invites us into her studio, sharing the ways she has divested her practice of non-renewable synthetics in favour of the craft of handmade, homegrown, local colour.
Learn the fundamental technique of how to make a lake pigment, transforming botanical dye into lasting, vivid pigment. This book will give you the tools to make the most vibrant natural colours that are perfect for your own artistic endeavours.
Sections include:
Botanical sources (cultivating, foraging, harvesting and storing dye plants).
The studio larder (essential equipment and ingredients).
Lake pigments (including Natalie's master lake pigment recipe).
Other plant pigments
Artists' materials (using your botanical pigments to make an array of artists' materials).
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Kat says 'Natalie is the lake-making guru of our times'
