Colourman · Ruardean · est. 2011

Eleven earths, dug two miles from the mill.

We work a licensed ochre face at Wigpool, wash the spoil in the yard, roast what needs roasting and mull the rest into oil colour by hand. Sixty tubes to a batch. Every batch on record, and every record still readable in forty years.

See the index How it is made
41pigments in the current index
60tubes to a batch, mulled by hand
200mesh, finest grade we sieve to
14 yrsof batch records, none lost

Batch 214 · closed 12 July

What a batch ticket carries

Pigment PR 102 Wigpool red, roasted four hours at 480°C until the yellow leaves it.
Ground to 140 mesh Two passes on the porphyry slab, then sieved twice. Nothing milled dry.
Bound with Linseed Cold-pressed, from Wiltshire. No driers, no stearate, no filler.
Yield 58 / 60 Two tubes held back for the reference shelf, as every batch is.

The bench

A colour is a material before it is a colour

Most paint sold as earth colour is a synthetic oxide, made in a reactor and identical batch to batch. It is a fine material and we are not against it. But it is not the same thing as the earth from a particular hillside, which has its own grit, its own transparency and its own way of going brown in the kiln.

Ada opened the Wigpool face in 2011 with one licence, one wheelbarrow and a geologist's stubbornness about provenance. Rhodri came the year after to run the mill. We are five now, and the wheelbarrow is still in service.

Read how it is made
The mulling bench: the slab, the muller, two heaps of pigment at different stages, and the jar shelf above.

What we do

Six things, done all the way through

Mined and washed on site

One face, one licence, worked by hand. Spoil washed and settled in the yard tanks for six weeks before it dries.

Hand-mulled colour

Glass muller on porphyry, two passes minimum. It is slower than a triple roll mill and it keeps the grit that makes an earth read as earth.

Filled to order

40ml and 150ml tubes, crimped and stamped the day they are filled. Nothing sits on a shelf for a year going tough.

Matching, against your sample

Send a flake, a photograph and the light it lives in. We draw down against it until it stops arguing.

Every batch recorded

Source, roast, mesh, binder, date, and two tubes on the reference shelf. Fourteen years of it, all still legible.

Sets and boxed plates

Made-up boxes for conservation studios and teaching: twelve earths, a muller, a slab and the notes to use them.

The undertaking

If we cannot tell you which hole it came out of, we will not sell it to you.

Provenance is the whole product. Every jar and tube carries a batch number that resolves to a face, a date and a depth. Conservators need that. So, it turns out, does everyone else.

From the reference shelf

Three plates out of the current book

A drawdown card: three pigments pulled down the sheet in one pass each.

Drawdown, batch 214

Index
PY 43 · PR 102 · PBr 7
Ground
40, 60 and 90 mesh
Pulled
12 July, in daylight
A section through the Wigpool seam, with the core sample lifted out beside it.

Wigpool, in section

Face
Wigpool east
Depth
4m to 9m, ochre at 7m
Drawn
On site, March
Four plates of the same pigment sieved at 40, 80, 140 and 200 mesh.

One earth, four grades

Index
PR 102
Grades
40 · 80 · 140 · 200
For
Gesso through watercolour

Photographs

The trade, photographed

Public-domain photography (CC0), stored in this folder and served locally — the page still makes no network request. Full credits in photos/CREDITS.md.

A dish of finely ground blue pigment.
Prussian blue, ground. Saalebaer, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Three orange reference cards photographed under different illuminants.
The same colour under three lights. Toto 601, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A sheet of weathered iron oxide, rust over blue-grey paint.
Iron oxide, weathering. Burnt Pineapple Productions, CC0, via Flickr.
They sent the batch record before they sent the invoice. In fifteen years of sourcing for the cathedral works I have not had that happen once.
Marianne Ostler · conservator, Hereford Cathedral works department

Orders

Tell us what you are painting.

Batches close on the last Friday of the month. Trade and conservation accounts are invoiced at 30 days; everyone else pays when the tubes are filled.

Order a batch Index & prices