Concrete Fun

Yesterday I got in a long overdue concrete repair. It was drizzly but warm with colder weather predicted so I had to get out there. (I'm an excellent procrastinator.) As the work went on, I thought about mixing in a few pigments to color things up. But as the rain began coming down harder, I tossed the thought and hurried to finish up.

Today I pulled down my simple forms. Not bad! :-)

The wheels were turning today and one thing led to another. Hey, why not trying making a small concrete pot colored with my pigments? Having 500 grams of Lemon Ochre, I figured that'd be a good selection.

The plan was to set the red cup into the plastic container so I pushed a pencil through for a drainage hole.

As this was going on I thought about adding a second pigment so I colored only half the concrete.

I chose English Red Deep, a mix of red German earths, for my second color. Then a mix of both concretes for an orange!

I dropped in a base of red, inserted the cup, and began adding layers from red to orange to yellow with a top off of red.

I found that the Lemon Ochre was not a strong coloring agent, requiring a good deal of pigment for that subtle yellow. The red, on the other hand, was intense. Just a little bit and the color took right off! I began thinking about which pigments might be powerful. Perhaps Viridian? Probably the synthetic organics--phthalos and quinacridones?

The red cup was popping up out of the concrete and after pushing it back in repeatably, setting the cap on the container worked well. Only thing is that the cup collapsed a bit, distorting the inner round shape. Clearly, more supportive forms would be useful.

Tomorrow we'll see how this works out.