Paint making with minerals from the Northwest

As part of the art class the students are learning the process of making paints from minerals that I have collected from around Oregon and Washington. On the left a few students are grinding minerals into pigment and sifting it through a sieve to remove any larger particles. On the right the pigments are being mixed with an egg tempra medium that is then being mixed with palette knives and a muller on a sheet of glass. Egg tempra is one of many potential mediums that can be used to make paint. Another traditional binder that the natives used for making the pictographs was salmon egg oil, which was abundant along the Columbia River, especially at Ceilo Falls where a large majority of the salmon where caught in dip nets as they made there way up the river to spawn. These traditional mineral paints will be used to add color to the students pictograph designs after they have been sandblasted into the columnar basalt that will be placed on the earth mound in the Marysville Elementary playground.