Making My Own Shimmering Watercolour Paints & Why I am turning into a Smurf!

Watch How I Made Interference Watercolour

Summer is flying by at a rapid pace. Instead of painting with Watercolours like I was planning on doing, I seem to be procrastinating by stocking up watercolour supplies, creating new shimmer paints, organizing and reorganizing my paint palettes. I love being able to have moveable colour pans. And

our poppies

Don't ask me how many brushes, palettes and watercolour pads I have purchased. If Amazon only had a frequent shopper reward system. 

Make Your Own Paint

This is about how I learned to make my own shimmer paints using Interference and shimmery/mica type pigments. As well, you will also see my transformation to a Smurf!

Of course there are many tutorials on creating watercolour paints on your own. Google them. I just want to share how I did it with as little effort as possible, without mulling. How do we learn if we don't experiment and learn from others. 

The cool thing is, we can use pigments to create acrylic and oil and tempura etc. paints also. The key is all pigments need to be combined with the appropriate binder. If you want to make watercolour as in my case, you need Gum Arabic solution (more on that later). For Acrylic you can use and Acrylic gel medium, I would even mic pigment powder with anything like polyurethane, varnish, clear glues. Basically anything that can harden, cure or dry. Using pigments in resins are also used to paint with resin "paint." Then for oil paint, you can use oil binders (not an expert on oil), I think Linseed oil is part of that paint? But not sure.

I definitely use purchased paint whether watercolour or acrylic. It's just after watching others make paint and especially shimmer paints, I thought I can try that. Since I have a collection of mica type pigments, I was excited to not need to by shimmer/colour shifting paints.

Materials Used

💗Shimmery/Mica Interference (mermaid) And Colour Shifting Pigment Powders

Binder ingredients

💗I also used a ready made Gum Arabic binder

💗Gum Arabic (I used it in powder form)

💗Vegetable Glycerin

💗Honey (tried some but decided it made the binder too sticky)

💗Clove oil (as a preservative for the binder that must be refrigerated)

Tools

💗A glass or ceramic tile

💗palette knife

💗a glass jar with lid

💗Paper towels

💗spray bottle of water

💗test paper in white and dark or black for testing paint

💗paintbrush

💗water jar for washing brushes

Watch the video to see how I started mixing pigment powder with the binder. Unfortunately, the camera overheated because it was too hot outside so I didn't complete the mixing process. Adding the binder in a bit at a time, waiting for the mixture to be like a watered down toothpaste sort of. Or kind of like Cheez whiz or sour cream, a combination between Greek and regular yoghurt texture. You can tell I like food by all the food references.😋 And then just make sure I was mixing and pressing down with the pallet knife as much as possible. Even if you think it's just mixed, there can still be unsaturated pigment particles. The more you mix, press, smoosh the powder with the binder, the better the paint will dry and be pretty darn good to use on paper.

Here are the half pan size paint pans

Once I am satisfied at the consistency of the pigment mixture I'd test out the mixture with a wet paintbrush on paper. With interference colours using black paper is the only thing that really works because you can't see the colour otherwise. I just like to make sure it's combined enough to create somewhat of a smooth paint. It's amazing how quickly the Arabic gum binder dries or cure's. Then I scrape it up with the pallet knife and drop it into a half or full watercolour paint pans.

Then let the paint basically dry out or harden. It's important to keep the lid off to let it harden. There's going to be mistakes made, and some paints may end up too wet and never really harden. You can still use them. But that's how we learn lessons. If you want to do the exact correct way to make watercolour paint using real authentic pigments and even the shimmer colour shifting pigment powders that I've used, then definitely check out the video about mowing below to see how it's done. And definitely check out lots of videos, to learn more about this process.

Please note: I do not use the proper technique for making watercolour paint simply because physically, I cannot use a device like a muller. Due to my neuromuscular disability, my hands and arms are not strong enough to even lift that thing. I just wanted to show you how it does work to some degree if you're just using shimmery powders and a pallet knife. Some pigments work better than others. Definer the pigment powders the better it seems to go..

Mulling

glass muller

How to make paints out of pigment powders the truly correct way, involves something called mulling, using a Muller. Here is what mulling watercolour paint looks like with a video on YouTube Showing how to do it correctly here at PearFleur The muller is a weighty piece of glass.

Binders are needed for all types of paint. In watercolour Gum Arabic is used in combination with water, glycerine and some use honey instead or with glycerine. I learned after to heat up the water (some recipes said to) When I did, it smelled badly and eventually it got better. Just look for recipes Watercolour Binder or I also purchased gum Arabic all ready to be used as a watercolour binder. 

You enjoy this and try it out.