I went back to the previous recipe. That was rough.

The milling was fine, but slow. This stuff is pretty viscous. The dispensing was painfully slow, and finishing the dispensing robot will be a big plus.

All of these were first fills, so it may be more expensive than normal. I will need to do another run in order to have fully filled pans to distribute.

I went back to the previous recipe. That was rough.

The milling was fine, but slow. This stuff is pretty viscous. The dispensing was painfully slow, and finishing the dispensing robot will be a big plus.

All of these were first fills, so it may be more expensive than normal. I will need to do another run in order to have fully filled pans to distribute.

This was pretty reasonable, although towards the end, my back was killing me.

Things to note:

• When mixing, make sure there is a paper funnel.
• Weight the pigment powder directly into the funnel, placed into the mixing cup on the scale. This makes things a little less messy.
• This particular run is using less of the honey and glycerine in the medium mix. It should be less gooey.
• The new medium recipe includes an extra 125ml of water, but I included an extra 160ml of water to the mix anyway. On the second run, I added the clove oil early, which thickened it considerably. It perhaps could have used more water to compensate.

Dispensing was miserable. My poor back. Again, the second batch was more viscous, so it took much longer. I have to make a new robot! Like now!

Update! A weekish later: mould appears on the magenta! Remember how honey is an antifungal agent? Well, it turns out that reducing the honey was a profoundly dumb idea. Don't do this! Expensive mistake!

This took forever, but it also worked very very well. Mixing was reasonable, and was not as messy as I remembered. I still did it outside, though.

I had less time on the drill press for pre-dispersion mixing, and I think that may have cost me an extra run. All told, I did 12 runs with the magenta, and the extra time milling was worth it. There was much less of the darker grey granules that plague the purple and the magenta when milled less.

I did add the extra water when I began, but around the eighth run, I needed to add even more in order to keep it fluid. This stuff really sucks up water.

Dispensing was miserable. Partly this was because I had rejigged my schmoo dispenser to use a new quieter stepper drive and I had not calibrated it properly. However, the magenta is also very very thick, and took longer to squeeze through the tubes.

This was much better than milling the violet!

I mixed the pigment in the shaker bottles. I measured out 75g of pigment and scooped it into the bottle. Then I added about 330ml of medium and shook for 45-60s. Then I repeated this, and rinsed the bottle with the remaining medium. Making a paper funnel to place inside the bottle to guide the pigment and hold down the dust might be nice.

The shaker bottles left quite a foamy mixture, so pre-dispersing on the drill press helped get a more homogenous mixture.

Milling was pretty straight forward. On the first batch, run #3 was very slow. This was because I had not been stirring the mix in the funnel and in the catch bowl in order to keep things consistent. On the second batch, I consistently mixed the batch in the hopper and the catch bowl and it went about 30min faster.

I added the clove oil earlier on the second run. This seemed to make a more consistent batch, but I woke up in the night with nasty allergies. Nasty!

Dispensing took a loooong time. As usual. I need to get that electronic dispenser going properly.

I should note that the magenta seemed to swell and take on water a little, a little like the yellow pigment. During the first batch, this slowed things down quite a bit. I added 125ml of water to the mix for the second batch, and this sped things up quite a bit.

It is interesting that the cost of the pigment is still less of a factor than the labour.

I found a 250ml bottle of Kama Pigments magenta magenta Aqua Dispersion. I mixed it into 500ml of watercolour medium with a whisk.

The milling was pretty good. There was a small amount that made it through the rollers, but otherwise the settings seemed good. It could be worth seeing if the rollers could be a little tighter.

I made 8 runs through the mill.

After the fourth run, I tested the grind and found that it was already excellent.

Clean up was great, and dispensing went quickly. I used a pipette set to 2.2ml and the dispensing went fast!

As a postscript, as the mix dried in the pans, the amount magenta was less than expected. I recommend using a 1:1 mix of medium to pigment dispersion if I mix this from the dispersions in the future.

750mL of Magenta Pr122 ($6.06 of medium + $80.13 of dispersion) = $86.19/368 pans = $0.234 per pan

Well, this is embarrassing to admit, but I have been milling a different pigment than I normally use. I bought the magenta pigment recommended by handprint.org, Quinacridone Violet (PV19), instead of Quinacridone Magenta (PR122). I have been losing sleep and going crazy trying to get magenta out of violet! This was actually a relief, since I was quite upset to be unable to get magenta, and I was worried that the problem was my competence. I am still concerned that the pigment is somewhat granular, but further experiments will help with this. I started to dispense the violet into pans: it was so smooth and creamy in comparison to the pre-made dispersions I bought.

Speaking of which, I did find an older bottle of Kama magenta dispersion to use for next semester. I made a batch of medium to mix it with, and then poured it into pans. The magenta was a little bit lumpy compared to the creaminess of the violet I made, but it is simply a better colour. What a learning experience!

Note: this batch had to be made in a hurry and was not milled.