Pigments

When Early People started to paint their homes and bodies, they did not have to look far for pigments to colour paints and dyes. By crushing local coloured rocks and mixing the powders with animals fats, they produced a range of colours. As trading routes expanded over the centuries, new colours were toxic (poisonous), so their colours are now produced in the laboratory.

Tourmaline

Colour Variation in a Mineral, Many minerals are always the same colour. This is useful for identification them. Show, however, exhibit a range of colours. For example, tourmaline may occur as black, brown, pink, green, and blue crystals or show a variety of colours in a single crystal.

Streak of some Minerals

Colour Clues, A useful aid in identification is the colour produced when a mineral is finely crushed. The simplest way to do this is to scrape the sample gently across an unglazed white tile. Many minerals leave a distinct coloured streak that may or may not be the same colour as the mineral; others crush to a white powder and leave no visible mark.

  Earthy Hues, Clays were used a lot by early  artists because they were widely available and, being fine-grained, were easy to grind up. They produced mostly drab green and brown colours.

Clay Minerals

Shades of White, The earliest white pigment was chalk, although in some areas kaolin was used instead. 

Chalk

Cave Painting, The earliest known artworks were done by cavemen using a mixture of clays, chalk, earths, and burnt wood and bones.

Black As Coal, Still popular with artists today, charcoal was well known to cave painters. They found plentiful supplies in the embers of their fires.

Coal 

Skin Coloring, The earthy variety of hematite produces a rich reddish-brown pigment. Vary finely powdered material was also used as a skin make up and has been employed as a fine polishing medium. 

Hematite

Brilliant Green, Malachite, a copper compound, produces a rich bright green. It was first used during the Bronze Age in Egypt. 

Malachite

Classical Blue, Azurite, a copper compound, was one of the great blue pigments of early peoples. This sample is particularly earthy and would have produced a fine, highly prized pigment.

Azurite

Fool’s Gold , Medieval artists used orpiment, an arsenic compound, to make many colours and to imitate gold. Its resemblance to gold made some chemists of the time try to extract the noble metal from it.

Orpiment

Natural Vermilion, The bright vermilion red of cinnabar (mercuric sulphide) was used in China in prehistoric times, but only came into widespread use in the Middle Ages (5th - 15th centuries). Vermilion was later made from mercury and sulphur. 

Cinnabar

Egyptian Orange, About 1,500 B.C. Egyptians first crushed realgar, an arsenic compound found in hot-spring deposits, to form an orange pigment. Medieval artists preferred to use the mineral cinnabar.

Realgar

Precious Blue, The refinement of lapis lazuli powder into rich ultramarine blue was first achieved in Persia. Because it was expensive, it was used less often than azurite. 

Lapis lazuli