Multidisciplinary
August 9-30, 2026
Tiered Tuition
$250-$600 Reserve My Spot
About the Offering
Sundays, August 9, 16, 23, & 30 at 2pm to 4pm (Eastern)
Up until very recently, all artists’ colors derived from natural materials—from plants, earth, stone, insects and animals. A rich history flourished around the globe for thousands of years, with crossover in the sources of dyes for textiles and pigments used by artists and craftspeople alike.
Today, the majority of the chromas used for everything from clothing to paint are synthetic, made from fossil fuels. However, a wealth of knowledge exists to produce color in ways that are more sustainable and that generate a deeper understanding of the natural world of which we are a part.
This practical workshop covers the foundations of natural color making for artists including sourcing, cultivating and foraging materials, the process of making botanical inks and lake pigments (essentially dry pigments) that can be transformed into a range of desired mediums, including watercolor, gouache, oil paint and pastels.
With a mix of presentations and hands-on demonstrations, the workshop will set you up to create your own studio colors and offer plentiful resources for continued learning.
A list of materials can be found here.
Materials Needed
No specific materials needed for this offering.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Lena Wolff
is an artist, craftswoman, independent teacher, and activist for democracy who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s. Working across a range of disciplines and material approaches, her practice extends out of American folk-art and quilt making traditions, minimalism, geometric abstraction, pattern and decoration movements, feminist art and social practice, with a studio output that spans drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based work and public, collaborative projects. Her work has been presented in galleries and museums across the country and is held in the collections of ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She lives with her wife, artist Miriam Klein Stahl, in Berkeley, California.
