Production of traditional mural pigments

Ancient paintings are also colored. As early as a long time ago, painted pigments appeared in Qin and Han Dynasties. Pigments are not only used in murals, but also in terracotta warriors and horses of Qin Shihuang. After Wei and Jin Dynasties, China's painting pigments became more colorful and developed greatly in Dunhuang art.

In ancient China, dyes were basically obtained from soil, natural minerals and plants, and then extracted and processed. Natural minerals are obtained by grinding, filtering and grinding colored rocks, and the process is very complicated. A relatively simple method is to extract juice from plants. The ancients mixed several basic colors to get different colors.

Guhuang can be obtained from Gardenia, Rehmannia glutinosa, Realgar and Tuohuang. Gardenia fruit contains yellow pigment, which is the most direct dye, while realgar is a covering pigment used by the ancients to make up for writing mistakes, and camel yellow is used as royal clothing because of its dazzling color.

Ancient orange can be obtained from hematite, cinnabar and madder, but hematite and cinnabar have low adhesion and are easy to fall off in painting, so the Zhou Dynasty began to dye and match colors with madder.

In ancient times, white can be obtained by wrapping with natural mineral sericite, but most of the white is obtained by bleaching. A long time ago, there was a method of sulfur fumigation and bleaching to obtain white color.

Black also comes mainly from plants. Acorn, Hollyleaf, rat tail leaves and persimmon leaves are all black dyes.

Other colors are overprinted by the most basic color mixture, so as to get different intermediate colors. Through their own constant attempts, the ancients obtained different intermediate colors for various workshops and paintings. Most importantly, the ancients obtained painting pigments from natural minerals and plants.