Ever scrubbed a beet or tumeric stain out of your favorite booty shorts and think “I bet I could make this messier and worse?” Ever stared at a red cabbage and wonder if you could make your whole apartment smell like salty farts? then DIY pigments might be for you.
Most of these were done using the lake method, using metalic salts to snag onto pigments in solution, and a base to precipitate them out. Most were from food scraps: an old cabbage, a freezer-burned bag of blueberries, expired cranberry sauce, slimy bag of spinach, floppy carrots, and a couple recovered pigments from dye baths using commercial products.
The three jars on the side are part of my verdigris farm, a small section of my forray into decomposing metals for more colourfast pigments. They all look different because the top two have different percentages of sulfur added to the acetic acid. So far more sulfur = more better.
Yes, I have a fan, dedicated utensils (since a chemist told me to,) and a mask with acid vapor filters. I just don’t use them.
Edit: I made a community for people who do these kinds of things, want to do these kinds of things, or like hearing about these kinds of things:
Your description sounds like genuine fun!