Kamasan painters also specialize in pictorial Balinese calendars. Kamasan paintings are actually colored drawings. Traditionally, rocks, leaves, soot, crushed limestone, bone, and other vegetable and mineral dyes produced yellow, blue, red, green, orange, caramel, dark ochre, and dark brown colors. Now poster paints are beginning to replace hand-pounded natural dyes. Cotton cloth is stretched, a layer of white rice flour starch applied, scenarios sketched from memory with charcoal, outlines drawn in with China ink, and the pigments filled in with a homemade, very fine bamboo paintbrush.
Figures are usually colored orange.
In the best pieces, look for figure set off by fluid and distinct black outlines. Colors are dabbed on the canvases before the black outlines, which are usually drawn by the master artist when finishing the piece. Colors should remain clear and separate without being muddied by overlapping. Because Kamasan lies outside the usual tourist routes, and because of the system of guide commissions that controls tourist marketing in Bali, these artists are unable to sell many paintings at a reasonable profit. The best of the Kamasan paintings are seriously undervalued and masterpieces can be purchased practically for the price of day labor and materials.