Q: I live in Brazil and I'm a frequent reader of Re-Nest. Congratulation on your inspiring work! We are planning to make some natural wall paint to decorate our bedroom. We collected a lot of annatto seeds, but now it's hard to find how to use them. We're thinking of using some tree oil to get the colour out of the seeds. But how to mix it to paint? Do you have any ideas? Help!
Asked by Carolina
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You are definitely facing a challenge with extracting color from seeds and then making paint from it. The pods of the plant contain a few seeds. The seeds only contain a small amount of color, probably about 5%. Extraction of color usually requires solvent. Water or oil would be your non-toxic choices for solvents. You could try grinding the seeds in water or oil to get color. Then strain the mixture to remove any plant matter. The bigger problem will be how it mixes with paint medium and also permanence. Because it is a natural dye, rather than a mineral pigment, you won't have good color permanence. With a color that may be very faint to begin with when mixed with paint, you may see very little color at all after the dye fades. Most natural dye colors are now mordanted on aluminum or iron to make the color more stable.
this is probably a better question for a google search rather than renest