The coloured cards in the suit of Cups without the Courts……
One tiny piece is left uncolored, I will do it later…
Have a nice day!
The Suit of Cups – coloured
Category: plant based paint
Colouring the Suit of Cups in the Hes – Derua Tarot
Yellow and red colours …these photos are about the colouring process of the Cup cards using plant based paints….
In the next photo of the Ace of Cups the green paint is just drying….
… as in the next photo about the Two of Cups.
In the photos you can see that the red colour is very shiny , it is because I put too much gummi arabicum in the paint, so it got too sticky. It is not easy to paint with either, because of the same reason: I have to paint the red patches in several layers…
Next time I post the – almost – entiry suit of Cups with all the colours.
Have a nice day, or evening:).
Page of Swords – bolder lines, natural paint
My pen arrived at last. So this is a first version of the Page of Swords , with bolder lines, and my plant based paints. The black colour I have not written about earlier comes from soot, which is not an easy paint to deal with, maybe because of the high fat content. Maybe nut or nutgall and iron would be better…. On this card I did not painted the face, hands, the inner side of the cloak, – at least , the lower part seems to be the same shade as the page’s face – and the stockings. All these parts of the card are painted in the original a slight brownish-pink shade. I decided doing it after I have coloured all the cards with the other colours. I think I have to postpone my decision, because I am really not sure….
The next photo is about the two versions of the Page of Swords. My first version , I have already coloured depicts a Page of Swords, not really typical for the this card. With this face he is a rather a Page of Cups:) Anyway , I like him. …The card on the right is my new version , much closer to the original Page of Swords in the Hes deck.
Have a nice day.
About the plant based paint I use for colouring my Hes cards
In the last post I showed the difference between the two Aces of Cups I coloured with commercial paint and my own natural one. In this post I would like to write about this process a little bit more ..
It is only February, so there are not many plants we can use for painting. My choice for blue was common or european privet (ligustrum vulgare), probably some late elderberries would have been better, but I could not find any…
Green was made from goldenrod (solidago canadensis),that I always dry and store for the winter as a herb. It makes a greenish yellow , a beautiful one on wool, but here I mixed it with privet-blue to have a more greenish shade.
blue made with common privet
my privet-blue hand and some samples of green paint made of goldenrod
There is a very pale red here , but as you can see in the next photo madder (rubia tinctorum) root can create a much vibrant red as well.
To produce plant paint for using it on paper you need some other “ingredients”, like gum arabic, or other gum from wild cherry tree or even from fruit bearing trees from your garden, although they can make your colours darker.
And I put some alum as well into the final mixture, to make the colours more shiny and it preserves them as well. Although for this reason I dry them so to get a fine powder.
As I mentioned in the previous post I have to find a way how to preserve the wood-cut look. Well , I have some ideas but about them I will write in one of the next posts:).
Have a nice day.
Re-creating the Hes Tarot 