The palettes carefully gathered from our family’s sugar bush, these small pieces of wood come from the magical Inaatig in our Ojibwe language or Acer saccharum in Latin, finally Sugar Maple in English. Every spring we tap hundreds of these trees when the nights are freezing but the day is above zero and the sun is shining. It’s a time of getting together, hard work, and family. It doesn’t hurt the tree and this same acreage we live on has been caretaken by our families since and before the treaties of our area were signed. It takes 40 litres of sap to make one litre of maple syrup!  Part of caring for the trees is carefully removing some dry branches, these palettes are made from those offcuts. I have always loved the feeling of them, like a living stone. 

Colours: Wet Grizzly, Salish Sea, + Harvest Wheat

Set includes...

• 3 handmade, plastic-free watercolour paintstones
• Samples of St. Armand paper (handmade in Montreal)
  
• #4 Travel Brush
• 1 beeswaxed cloth - reuse it for travelling with your paints!

Beam Paints is the result of a multi-generational love of pigment, paint, colour, and innovation. I was raised by my artist parents, Carl Beam and Ann Beam, and was taught from a young age how to harvest hematite pigment in the LaCloche mountain range near our home in M'Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. Beam Paints draws on my early educations in Indigenous pigment and expands it to encompass all paint traditions. A focus on high quality pigment content creates sublime artist materials, with plastic free packaging.

Lightfast pigments, tree sap, gum arabic, and Manitoulin honey, blend together to create a handmade  saturated colour that is a joy to paint with. From thick stripes to fine washes and details, quality is evident in every stroke. Our watercolours are shaped into paintstones, our version of a half-pan, before being wrapped in beeswaxed canvas. Our pans are packaged in slices of cedar and birch offcuts from an Indigenous sustainable lumber operation.

We manufacture and ship all our colours from our family workshops in M’Chigeeng First Nation on beautiful Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron one of the five Great Lakes in Ontario, Canada!

Made sustainably in Ontario, Canada.