Making your own honey water for traditional paint making
Honey as an ingredient appears many times in ancient, medieval paint recipes. The noble and sweet material is not only tasty but also very functional. Honey provides suppleness to the paint, slows drying but, above all, it prevents the paint layer becoming brittle over time.
It is therefore for this reason that a quantity of honey was added to the aqueous binders. It is nice to see a renowned company like Sennelier in Paris advertising the watercolour paint they make, which is not only of high quality but also made with honey. ‘Only the finest, pure gummi arabicum from Kordafan, mixed with glycerine is used as a binder and addition of honey for all 98 extremely highly pigmented colours’ says the advertisement for these watercolours.
But what about it, can you just put honey from a jar into your paint? Traditionally, honey was first purified and diluted with water and then thickened again. During this process, the honey was cleaned of impurities that surfaced as foam. The purer the honey the less foam comes to the surface during processing. It is best to use pure acacia honey which is very light in colour and therefore has little effect on the character of the colours themselves. After processing the honey, we obtained the so-called: honey water and in this piece I want to show how to make it ourselves.
A point to note, however, is that you should try to buy the purest honey possible and that is best from a local beekeeper. Store-bought honey is often adulterated especially honey from outside the EU.
What do we need?
- A jar of acacia honey
- Demineralised water
- A saucepan
- A wooden spoon
- Clear clove oil
- Stick
- Pencil
Recipe
- Pour the honey from the jar into the saucepan.
- Take a stick and measure the height of the honey in the saucepan and mark it with a pencil mark.
- We bring the honey to a gentle boil and let it bubble for a while. We now see that a froth forms from ‘impurities’ in the honey. The purer the honey the less foam. We carefully take off the foam with the spoon.
- Now fill the empty honey pot with demineralised water and pour it into the saucepan with honey while stirring. We now let the solution boil gently until the height has returned to the measure we indicated on the stick. The water will evaporate and in the meantime more foam will rise, which we remove with a spoon.
- After cooling, we can put the honey in a jar. Add one or two drops of clear clove oil for preservation. Honey itself preserves well but impurities can still be ‘carried along’ during preparation, which can lead to mould.
- I wrap the pots with aluminium foil or use a brown glass bottle to prevent the honey from darkening. Yes how long can you store it? There are those who say several months but I have used it from over a year old. The downside is that it can darken a bit if you store it for a very long time but it still works….
