Did you know people used to paint with dead bodies? This is mummy brown. It's a bottle from 1857. This pigment was acquired from a private collector and it's seen binder for the first time in ages. Maybe for the first time ever. It is said to be a pigment made out of ground mummies. This version is a chart version of it, something that was quite common to do. Since you get a deeper hue and a finer pigment, there is also a raw version of mummy brown, which is even more rare and unfortunately I don't have. Working with this, as well as Indian yellow and Paris green, was an exciting thing to do. It's like the holy trinity of historic pigments, mysterious pigments that is now complete and made into a paint. As a pigment itself, it's quite gritty at the start, but as you can see here, it breaks down quite easily. It wetens into a smooth and as you can see later a very fine paint. It smells a bit like an earth pigment or something with a hint of unburnt calls. There's also a fragrance I can't quite put my fingers on, but it might make sense looking at the origin of the pigment. It could be something like incense or maybe a resin of some salts that I'm not familiar with. I didn't really sniff the dry pigment. I don't like the idea of dead people dust boogers of my nose, but I could smell it well and made the paint. A very macabre story around mummy brown is that they ran out of mummies. So they weren't obtained legally, or not at all. So what else did they use as an alternative? Well, they used mummified animals, cats, birds, crocodiles are known to have been mummified and they're less low of specimens, mummified specimens around the museum. But the story goes that when they ran out of mummies, they actually dried out criminals that were sentenced to death in the desert. To be naturally mummified and used dose as a substitute for mummy powder. Since mummy wasn't always and only used as a pigment, but also as a form of medicine. Anyway, I don't want to think too much about that. As you can see here, it smooths out to be quite a lovely shade, hue, brown. And it's quite smooth now. So I've been milling it for some while, and I don't want to waste anything. So I need to get everything of my slab, of the miller. So I'm left with just a tiny bit genuine mummy brown. I noticed while milling and scraping here as well, you can't really see it on the camera. There's a fiber substance in it as well that you can see well scraping it. Let's see if you can also see that while swatching it. So here it looks like almost a black paint. As a swatch, something interesting happens. The hue goes from here like an almost raw number mixed with black to a warmer burnt sienna when it dries. There's even some resemblance with castle earth, though a bit warmer and more dulled when dried. So it has a drying shift. I also made a swatch of unmelt pigment mixed in alcohol. So it evaporates and I'm just left with a very thin layer of pigment. And it shows an amazing array of browns going from yellowish to almost a deep red. It was really interesting, but that was something that I used for under the microscope, which unfortunately didn't give me a lot. Here, as you can see, I'm made one and a half dots of mummy brown. I hope you liked it and see you next time.