Sunday Read: The Mushroom Color Atlas
Imagine your next favourite colour didn’t come from a factory at all but from a damp log, a gilled cap, or a velvet bracket growing on a beech. The Mushroom Color Atlas invites you to wander off the beaten track and into a kaleidoscope beneath our feet, where pigments are wild, local, and a little bit mischievous. These are the original “local colours”: no shipping, no corporate palette, just seasonal surprise.
A wheel of mushroom colour. Photo credit: Julie Beeler
Conceived by artist, designer and educator Julie Beeler of Bloom & Dye, and published by award-winning Chronicle Books, this handsome volume illustrated by Yuli Gates is equal parts art book, field guide and colour-distillation workshop. It shows you, with clear, practical steps, how to forage and positively identify more than two dozen colour-rich fungi, how to prepare mushroom matter and fibre, and how to coax luminous dyes, paints and pigments from the forest’s foragers. “Mushrooms are chemical wizards, and Julie Beeler is a masterful guide,” writes Merlin Sheldrake, and the Atlas reads like a friendly apprenticeship in the art and science of natural colour.
The Mushroom Color Atlas by Julie Beeler
Beeler’s story begins in Oregon, at the foot of Mount St. Helens where the forests of her childhood were forever changed after the 1980 eruption. From that landscape of loss and regrowth grew a lifelong curiosity in seasonal cycles, interdependence and the unruly alchemy of the natural world. In the Atlas she marries the rigour of repeatable experimentation with the intuition of a maker. The result is a colour story you can use, remix and learn from in a living reference that welcomes variation. It’s a living reference that welcomes variation: don’t expect every batch to be identical, and please accept the occasional shy cap with good humour.
A Mushroom Color Atlas chart. Photo by Micah Fischer courtesy of WildCraft Studio School.
There’s an undercurrent of quiet rebellion here. In an era awash with synthetic dyes and screen-derived palettes, extracting colour from fungi feels refreshingly radical. The practice asks you to slow down, make decisions with your eyes and hands, and accept unpredictability. It’s restorative work: hands in soil, eyes on seasonality, and a reconnection with the endless networks of mycorrhizal threads, tree roots, and soils that sustain forests and, by extension, us.
Inside A Mushroom Color Atlas by Julie Beeler
The Atlas is carefully structured into three parts: Colours, Mushrooms, Process. As such, you can dip into pigment portraits, species profiles or workshop-style instructions. It’s also a collaborative labour: designed by Brad Johnson, programmed by Danny Rosenberg and illustrated by Yuli Gates in a testament to how creative communities can amplify curiosity.
Paint created from mushroom pigments, conceived during a teaching session with Flora Arbuthnott of Plants and Colour. Photo courtesy of Julie Beeler.
Whether you’re an artist seeking a new palette, a designer imagining regionally rooted textiles, a scientist tracing ecological networks, or a weekend forager with a dye-bath at heart, The Mushroom Color Atlas is an invitation. It’s a manual, a manifesto and a love letter to stewardship, encouraging us to understand our impact on delicate forest networks and to help the planet, one hand-dyed skein at a time.
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Further Information:
The Mushroom Color Atlas by Julie Beeler is available to purchase now from Chronicle Books.
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: The Mushroom Color Atlas by Julie Beeler. Cover illustration (detail) by Yuli Gates.
All other images as credited in photo captions.