Original artwork description:

I wonder what colours the 17th century painter Alexander Marshall had in his arsenal.

If in general the answer is obvious - the more wealthy artist was, the more pure and varied were his colours. And what pigments were found at that time and available - this question for me, as an expert, is more than interesting!

And from a lecture on the history of botanical painting, we know that: "Marshall composed the colours for his drawings himself, experimenting with pigments extracted from berries, flowers, roots, resins, and he also used copper and arsenic. This gave his drawings an extraordinary brightness of colour which has been preserved to this day." I don't know where to find copperbur and arsenic, and I don't really want to. Nowadays one can easily find similar colours without "heavy artillery". The main condition is to choose mixtures as close to the original as possible. I have tried to squeeze the maximum out of my rich colour palette, close to the shades of the 17th century.

The work is on 100% cotton Saunders Waterford archival quality 300g/cm watercolour paper, using the world's finest watercolour paints with the highest index of lightfastness.

Materials used:

Watercolor

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