It's a long shot, but has anyone here tried making paint using natural plant pigments and acrylic medium? I'm looking into mixing paint in attempt at making something less environmentally damaging and the only ones available online seem to be household paints and watercolours.

It's giving me a headache trying to find this stuff out, but anyway here's what I've discovered. Not sure if anyone'll find this useful, but it's hard to find information on this online so I thought I'd post it anyway:

* Paints with "hue" at the end of their names tend to be less toxic.
* Non-toxic mineral pigments aren't particularly environmentally friendly because of the processes involved in removing them from the ground.
* Pure acrylic is allegedly a good non-toxic resin - plant oils (linseed, soy) can be energy-intensive to harvest and hard to use. I'd rather not use animal products like egg tempera or casein.
* Don't inhale mineral pigments! Wear a dust mask.

So far I've only tried mixing pure acrylic medium with natural pigments. Not sure how permanent they are, but they should at least be okay for practice work. Here's a list:

Yellow - tumeric
Orange - tumeric + paprika
Red/mauve - alkanet root or beetroot
Pink - rosehip granules or beetroot
Blue - blue chamomile or blue cypress essential oil
Green - blue chamomile + tumeric
Brown - cinnamon
Peach - paprika
Black - charcoal

The colours are pretty good (haven't tried all of them yet) but the paint is really grainy. Not sure how to get around this. Then again, I'm not sure how grainy mineral pigments turn out when mixed with paint and what people do about that. Have to look into it.

Useful links:
[link]
[link] has a list of non-toxic permanent mineral pigments
[link]
[link] has a little info on longevity

If anyone else has tried this I'd really appreciate your comments. This is giving me a headache! Thanks.