I feel very lucky to live in a region where rockhounding for pigment is a possibility. Rocks are everywhere here, and many of them are excellent sources for a range of colors!
The Ozarks are beautiful, and I really love using the colors of this land to make my paintings.
A little background
My journey with rocks began long ago when I lived in a place that didn’t have many. I actually had to buy paving rocks for my garden when I lived in south Louisiana. But I’d drive to gravel quarries in Mississippi then to look for rocks – fossils and petrified wood, mostly.
When I moved to Kingston, Arkansas it was like moving to a rockhounding paradise. There are rocks everywhere – and most people hate that about them. One thing became quickly obvious … I’d never need to ‘buy’ another rock in my lifetime. Unless it was a special sort of rock from somewhere else.
Rockhounding for color
Since moving here, I’d noticed the color inside of the rocks. Cars and trucks driving over them on the driveway cracked them open. Yellows, red, brown, all in earthy tones spilled out of cracked rocks on the driveway.
It took me a while to get around to it, but in 2018 I tried rubbing some of the rock dust onto paper and saw that it made color. And that set off a journey to figure out how to make paint.
My research showed me that paint used to be made from rocks (and other really interesting sources like bones, antler, clay, and plants and even insects!) all of the time.
At this time I was not yet a painter. I was a drawer/sketcher, though.
I made my first set of paints (watercolor) in the summer of 2018. They weren’t yet dry when I had to leave for a trip, so I brought them all with me to Qatar. Being an international flight, and customs to go through, I was a little worried about whether my little jars of paint would make it there too.
First painting
We made it through all the hoops intact! No one cared about my paints, and I even declared them to avoid any surprises. The only holdup was at the customs desk in the Doha airport – I couldn’t remember the name of the community where my husband lived off-base, which was my destination.
It’s part of the larger Doha area, but not called Doha and the customs agent wanted to know where I was going-specifically. After a little stressed out searching my brain for the name, I remembered it was Al Rayyan. And with a smile, he stamped my passport and let me through!
While my husband was at work during the day at Al Udeid airbase, I spent my time figuring out how to paint something with my newly made rock and plant-based paints. Here’s my first painting:
Fast forward to now
I kept making paints, practicing how to paint and then in 2023 started experimenting with oil paints made from the same pigments. Except that I quit working with most plants since those often faded away or turned brown.
Now there are only a couple of plants that I’ll use (thyme, Osage root bark). I do buy primary yellow, green, blue, and white pigment powders so I can modify the earthy green shades from my Ozark pigment to something that more closely resembles green.
In watercolors, limestone makes a great white. But for oil paints, it’s a clear paint. So I buy titanium powder to make a white paint in oils. Otherwise all of the colors in this painting, especially those vibrant skies, are entirely Ozark:
Rockhounding for life
While my paints do last a long time, I still pick up the rocks that look like they’ll make great paint. And I still pick up any fossils I find and bring them home.
Do you want to learn how to make paint from rocks?
I started an online class to teach others. The first lesson goes up tomorrow (1/7/2026). Once all of the lessons are uploaded, it’ll be a work-at-your-own pace class and will remain available indefinitely.
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