Alizarin

Hope you're not yet bored of purple dyes...
I have just discovered that Alizarin comes from the Madder plant - which is what Thyatiran 'Purple' was made from.

It's a bit too red in the photo.

Alizarin Crimson paint is actually now often made from Quinacridone, which is more lightfast, but has nothing like as nice a name. Nor as nice a colour.

Natural pigments

Here's a very interesting set of posts on making paint from natural materials.

One of the colours she used was madder, which is particularly interesting in the light of my previous post about purple. In Thyatira, purple was made from the madder plant, not shellfish. This means it would be even redder than most ancient purple. 

Interesting conundrum for illustrating: do I make Lydia's 'purple' completely historically accurate, therefore not actually what we would call purple at all? Or do I make it closer to what we would call purple - not being strictly accurate, but going as red as possible while still being purple to our eyes?

I think I would lean to the latter for illustrations to be used while telling a story. It has to make sense, and it's enough to have to stop and explain to the children that purple clothes were very expensive in those days, without trying to explain that they also weren't actually purple at all... In an information-type book, however, you could give more of an explanation. 

Sometimes you need to use a wee bit of artists' license.

Purple

These are the colours in my palette that I would consider to be purples:

 Particularly, these types of colours: 

c60 m60 y0 k0;   c60 m80 y0 k0;   c50 m90 y0 k0;   c40 m100 y0 k0

Purple is actually a tricky colour to show on screen.

For paint, I would consider dioxazine violet to be a very typical purple (mauve too, to a certain extent).

However, in ancient times, purple was a bit different.
It could vary too, but was closer to this:

r102 g2 b60 (approx c52 m99 y81 k7)

I've just added this to my palette. I have others that would work well too - but only the last one was in my original 'purple' chart:

c22 m100 y40 k46;   c15 m100 y40 k35;   c20 m100 y30 k15

Beni Hassan nomads

If you are not as excited by this as I am, evidently you don't spend your time obsessively researching ancient clothes... You can click it and zoom right in!

Unfortunately, it's not the original, just a painting copied directly from the wall in the 1930s. But any photos I've seen of the original have been rather small and blurry:
 

Picture by Kurito

Picture by Kurito

I have often used these pictures (or copies of them) as reference - would be great to see the real ones, though!

 Anyway, better get back to work I'm actually supposed to be doing...

Website!

I now, finally, have a website!
There's no more on it at present than my portfolio you saw before. I'll do more work on it over time. But at least it's there, with its own address: kirstymca.co.uk

The women

Character sheet of Jesus' women disciples.

Just done in pencil, as this actual picture won't be used - it's just a reference for me. Like the men, I have based them on what we actually know about them, what we can  guess from what we know - and a great deal of imagination.

I'm assuming Mary Magdalene is Martha's sister Mary. There are arguments both for and against, but in the end I had to make a decision, and those two Marys seem similar in character. I'm assuming 'the other Mary' is both Mary the wife of Cleopas and the mother of James & Joses. And I'm assuming Salome is James & John's mother.

A brand new portfolio

I still have the old one, on the Association of Illustrators. But I now have a new one on Hire an Illustrator.

I like this one because I can choose what order the pictures go in. Also, I can have more pictures. And it's just easier to use.