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...
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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.