Botanical Colors

From Plant to Pigment: Cook the Book with Natalie Stopka June 25-28, 2026

In this four-day workshop, participants will follow along with Natalie to cook their way through her book From Plant to Pigment: How to make your own vibrant inks, pastels and paints, concocting a rainbow of lake pigments from a variety of extraction methods. We’ll also dip into indigo pigments, charcoal, ink, and pastel. Working through the recipes with Natalie’s guidance, we will reveal the operative chemistry of botanical pigments, come to grips with the question of lightfastness, and learn to control the value, saturation, translucency, and opacity of our colors.

This workshop is designed to provide a solid technical foundation, along with rich context for artistic inspiration and conceptual connectivity. Participants will leave with a travel case of 12 watercolors in brilliant hues, and the knowledge to continue expanding their palette with handmade botanical pigments. Don’t let From Plant to Pigment suffer the fate of so many art manuals and cookbooks: sitting on a shelf to gather dust, their contents unplumbed and lessons unlearned!

Inspired by the history and craft of color-making, From Plant to Pigment: How to make your own vibrant inks, pastels and paints is a recipe book for creating handmade, homegrown, and local pigments. Join author Natalie Stopka to learn the process of transmuting fragile botanical dyes into vibrant lake pigments and a take-home palette of watercolors.

Travel Information

Seattle in late June is glorious, with extra long days and sunshine. We will plan a charcoal making excursion to a nearby park or the beach along with cocktails and mocktails, so don’t miss out on one of our workshop highlights of the year!

This workshop date overlaps with the FIFA World Cup and if you are traveling from out of town, we recommend making travel arrangements early.

Bio

Natalie Stopka is an interdisciplinary artist focused on botanical color and its material history. She has been sharing her expertise and love of plant colorants with students for over a decade, and is the author of From Plant to Pigment: How to make your own vibrant inks, pastels and paints (Skittledog, 2025). Raised on the south coast of Massachusetts, Natalie holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico. Her studio and dye garden are in Yonkers, New York and she currently teaches at SUNY New Paltz.