Beam Paints Indigenous-Made Watercolors: Beaver Pond Palette

Description

While supplies last, buy any Beam Paint and get a free Beam Paint watercolor sample as a gift!

We are excited to offer a range of indigenous-made watercolors from Beam Paints on Manitoulin Island in Canada. Beam Paints is located in M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island/Mnidoo Mnising. Beam Paints watercolors are for use on paper and are not textile dyes. But their products are a wonderful intersection of colors derived from high quality pigments and ingredients. Anong Beam has been very thoughtful about the pigments she uses. She has rigorously tested her paints for lightfastness and safety. I think you will find her palettes beautiful and inspiring.

We are proud to introduce Beaver Pond. It is a limited edition, specialty watercolor palette of 9 paintstones (each roughly equivalent to a half-pan) inspired by the natural forest oasis of the beaver pond. These micro climates are a glorious home to birds, amphibians, and flowers, all taken care of by the industrious beaver. Spring Green, Boreal, Sky Blue, Rainforest (mica) Lake Huron Teal, Wintery Night (mica) Wet Grizzly (mica) and Robins egg. Wrapped in a lovely forest print of 100% beeswaxed cotton.

If you are not up on how beavers are helping protect from the impacts of climate change and sequester carbon, check out this article in The Scientific American.

Anong Beam from Beam Paints writes

These little jewels are also about our values and support our respect for the earth and being plastic free. We wrap in folded handmade paper from St Armand Papeterie in Montreal, and are our answer to halfpans! Free your art kit!!

Beam Paints is the result of a multi-generational love of pigment, paint, colour, and innovation. I was raised by my artist parents, Carl Beam and Ann Beam, and was taught from a young age how to harvest hematite pigment in the LaCloche mountain range near our home in M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. Beam Paints draws on my early educations in Indigenous pigment and expands it to encompass all paint traditions. A focus on high quality pigment content creates sublime artist materials, with plastic free packaging.

When I make paint I think about my Dad a lot, he taught me when I was really small to identify hematite and look for paintstones. He kept them in his art bag in a little cloth wrapper, and when he needed paint he brought them out and prepared his paint for ceramic bowls, drums, or rocks. I really wanted something of my paint making practice to share the tactile joy of the physicality of paint, and this is it!