Biopigments time!

What is the natural color palette where you live?

Each place has different colors depending on the plants, soil and natural materials available there. I aimed to discover the Atacama desert’s pigments by pulverizing different plants, seeds, corn kernels and even llama guano into powder to make biopigments!

Thanks to @violetintorera for the beautiful maqui, yerba mate and quintal pigments, to @somoslabva for the lichen and mussel pigments and to both for inspiring me to start making my own palette.

Passion fruit is one of my favorite fruits, so whenever I managed to find one in Chile it was like finding gold in fruit form. One day during my @lawayakacurrent residency, I started playing around with the shadows of a dried passion fruit peel and that’s how my watercolor shadows series was born! All of these pigments are natural (maqui berry, quintal and yerba mate) from the wonderful @violetintorera.

In the driest place on earth, it is a wonder how the Licanantay people have been able to create an oasis of trees, flowers and plants. Where we stayed in Coyo was surrounded by a medicinal garden that Carlos uses as part of his healer practice.

I wanted to celebrate the oasis - a symbol of hope for a planet that is experiencing desertification due to climate change. Even here under the harsh sun and winds, gardens that sustain communities grow. I focused on this by tracing the shadows the plants from Carlos’s garden, and then painted them with the pigments mostly created from those plants.

The paintings/sketches below are when I was playing around with the natural pigments of Atacama! I made as much art (and pigments) as possible instead of focusing on the end result because I wanted to practice painting with watercolors and sadly I couldn’t take the pigments with me.