Lake pigments are pigments which aren’t naturally thick enough to make into paint, and so they have to be combined with something – a thickener – before being turned into some sort of paint using a medium. It has an ancient history – used across Asia and down into Egypt for a variety of tasks, including clothing dye and coloring ceramics, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that a thickener combination was found which enabled it to be used as paint. In the late 1800s the first artificial red was created, based off of the chemical makeup of madder, and even that faint remnant of madder vanished when light resistant reds were synthesized in the 1950s. I went with a slightly orange red for my tinting, as I found nothing in my inventory to match, and actually swiped ideas shamelessly from other bloggers this week – Luna herself inspired the necklace, though I tinted mine, and vyoletta guyot pointed me toward the awesome dress to match. I ended up looking into Madder Lake Deep‘s history for some idea of what to say; it’s my first day of vacation, and I’m feeling kind of brainless and stressed (a difficult combination!).

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I ended up taking pictures at The Tower, but I’m deeply conflicted about it – and the vast majority of my pictures made use of the environment of the tower without particularly focusing on most of the figures within it.