During my last foraging walk on the beach I found a large chunk of what I thought was a nice brown rock, I am always looking for brown rocks. Burnt umber is one of my favorite colors. It turns out the brown rock was a chunk of steel coated in a thick rocky coating of rust and sand.

Awesome. I collected it.

I washed it clean of surface sand and salt.

Then I smashed it with a hammer to roughly coffee bean sized.

Very satisfying.

Of course I did not take a single picture of any of these steps, though I did accidentally take a picture of the rust blob through a rock identification app.

​From the hammer smashing part I then followed the same steps as brick- it got run through 2 steps of coffee grinder- one at french press size and again at espresso size.

I ended up having to let the french press sized particles dry on a plate for a few hours. When the rock is too damp it binds up the grinder- even when I use a drill to expedite the process.

I process my rocks damp to cut down on dust, but there is a fine line for too little and too much water.

My pigment isn’t dry yet, but the yield was pretty low especially when compared to brick. But then I think everything will pale in comparison to the yield of brick. The color so far is a nice deep brown.