Making Madder Lake - Part 5

I have now repeated the siphoning/washing process four more times, and the water is now clear and the process thus completed. Here are photos of the progression, showing the water becoming clearer after each wash:

After 24 additional hours:

After 8 additional hours:

After 8 additional hours:

After the final 8 hours:

The product of the last week of effort is now clearly visible at the bottom of the bucket -- very fine red powder that is the madder lake pigment, which will be added to the oil varnish to add the red tones:

At this point, the common practice is to filter out the pigment from the remaining water, let it dry, and then grind it into very small particles and store the dry pigment in jars for future use. Gregg tells me that he has a way to avoid the labor of grinding by keeping the pigment wet, so I will skip the filtering/grinding step for now.

For a quick color check, I compared my color to the commercially available Madder Lake from Kremer:

This check, of course, is not accurate because my pigment is wet and the Kremer pigment is dry, but it confirms that I am at least in the ballpark in regards to color. Now, at the great relief of some readers, back to the violin itself.