“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The pigment however is hard to prepare. The sculptors do not trust him. Some of the ingredients come from the hillsides—scooped earth. Some from herbs. The colors must be prepared differently than for frescos.

(Rembrandt’s technique has been the subject of much speculation over the centuries. Especially when he took to piling pigment up to a thickness of a quarter of an inch in such paintings as “The Jewish Bride”—a masterwork. It is thought he used stand oil—heat-treated linseed oil—and varnish of various kinds as a medium. If he added anything else to his pigments it would be well worth learning about.)

(Lead white, for centuries, has been the recommended white pigment for oils, and indeed before this century was the only white available, as far as I know. It is poisonous. Even today most authorities still regard it as having superior properties to all other white pigments. In this life, however, I prefer zinc white.)

There was a varnish, finally, that you mixed in with some of the pigments after they were prepared, with the dry pigments after they were prepared, that served as a binding agent that also protected each color from the other one. There was a slight lead content mixed into the varnish.

(In those days, tubes for paints did not exist—all color had to be prepared fresh each day by the artist or assistants, from dry pigment. Varnish was often used as an ingredient in mediums. There are and were, many kinds of varnish. A slight lead content in a varnish sounds quite possible.)

You also experimented with inserting odors into pigment, very briefly, for churches, so that a violet for example would smell like the flower. You would mix ground rose petals into the red pigment to be used for a painting of roses.