Last Wednesday (I know, I'm behind) we went to the Ocher Mines near Roussillon with my Treasures of Provence class. It was a lot of fun, if very cold. We first took a tour of the area. The lady that gave us a tour was this short, but very pretty woman that spoke English very well. She only struggled to find the right word maybe three times. I'm still amazed how well the people her can speak both French and English. I guess that's what happens when they are taught a second or sometimes even third language at a young age.
Basically what the tour consisted of her taking us around to all the different areas that were involved in the process of making ocher. A basic run down of the process is that sand containing ocher is collected and run through different machines to separate it. The the ocher pigment is left in the sun and open air to dry before being made into bricks of ocher. All the bricks are collected and ground down into a fine powder, ready to be separated into jars and sold in store. I also learned that red ocher oxidized yellow ocher, because all ocher contains iron in it. So in order to get large quantities of red ocher, they force oxidation. Which is kinda cool imo.
Anyway, after the tour we got to watch a demo on mixing your own paints. And after she had explained to us the process then we got to actually make our own paints using the natural pigments. It was an amazing experience mixing your own watercolours. I use the red ocher, because that is one of my favourite colours, but really all the colours that she had available were mixed at one point and used by everyone.
The store there sold a whole lot of the pigments along with other cool natural pigmented art supplies, such as pastels. I didn't get any though because they were fairly expensive, and I don't really know how often I would use it. Oh, before we went to mix paints, we visited this small memorial dedicated to the workers that had died because of some kind of lung disease from breathing in all the ocher dust that a visiting artist had built as a permanent installation. It was sort of sad, but also an interesting display none-the-less.
After our tour, we drove to Roussillon, but only stayed for about 15 minutes before we had to drive back to Lacoste for lunch. I did get some cool photos during those 15 minutes though.
Last Wednesday (I know, I'm behind) we went to the Ocher Mines near Roussillon with my Treasures of Provence class. It was a lot of fun, if very cold. We first took a tour of the area. The lady that gave us a tour was this short, but very pretty woman that spoke English very well. She only struggled to find the right word maybe three times. I'm still amazed how well the people her can speak both French and English. I guess that's what happens when they are taught a second or sometimes even third language at a young age.
Basically what the tour consisted of her taking us around to all the different areas that were involved in the process of making ocher. A basic run down of the process is that sand containing ocher is collected and run through different machines to separate it. The the ocher pigment is left in the sun and open air to dry before being made into bricks of ocher. All the bricks are collected and ground down into a fine powder, ready to be separated into jars and sold in store. I also learned that red ocher oxidized yellow ocher, because all ocher contains iron in it. So in order to get large quantities of red ocher, they force oxidation. Which is kinda cool imo.
Anyway, after the tour we got to watch a demo on mixing your own paints. And after she had explained to us the process then we got to actually make our own paints using the natural pigments. It was an amazing experience mixing your own watercolours. I use the red ocher, because that is one of my favourite colours, but really all the colours that she had available were mixed at one point and used by everyone.
The store there sold a whole lot of the pigments along with other cool natural pigmented art supplies, such as pastels. I didn't get any though because they were fairly expensive, and I don't really know how often I would use it. Oh, before we went to mix paints, we visited this small memorial dedicated to the workers that had died because of some kind of lung disease from breathing in all the ocher dust that a visiting artist had built as a permanent installation. It was sort of sad, but also an interesting display none-the-less.
After our tour, we drove to Roussillon, but only stayed for about 15 minutes before we had to drive back to Lacoste for lunch. I did get some cool photos during those 15 minutes though.
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