Making Pigments

Since I am almost ready to start my painting with tempera. I must first prepare myself for the painting process. In doing this I have taken it upon myself to make the pigments from scratch which I thought would be much more enjoyable. This past week I have so far made blue, white, and yellow, yellow being my most recent. In the making of yellow I used a combination of Potassium Iodide (KI) and Lead Nitrate Pb(NO3)2. After mixing the two seemingly clear formulas together we immediately saw the precipitate reaction causing them to turn into a bright yellow liquid that looked like ground up cheese.

As of right now I am still waiting for the yellow to solidify so that we can collect it for the final project. The whole process is really interesting and gives me a more interesting viewpoint on the manufacturing of synthetic pigments.