The Art of Making Paint

 Last week at the South Bay Art Association's General Membership Meeting we were treated to a demo by SBAA artist, Christie Jones of Swell Anchor Studio. Christie makes her own paint and sells it. Her handmade paints are created with natural pigments and non-toxic materials. She showed us how she mixes the pigments with a honey-based binder. The entire of blending the mixture takes about an hour, but the binder takes a long time too. It is really labor intensive. Christie makes small batches of paint. To create her sets for sale she uses oyster and clam shells that she collects from local restaurants to hold the paints. For each of her sales she donates oysters to the Long Island waters. This year she donated 2,500 oysters which filter 125,000 gallons of water a day!

After watching her shortened paint making process all the members who were interested had creative time to use the newly made paint that she distributed in small shells as well as a number of other colors that she had in baskets. I'm sure you can guess that my small painting had something to do with the ocean. lol The paint couldn't get any fresher than this! Thank you, Christie!