A Little Bit Different: A Look at "Pale" Alchemy Stones

Alchemy Stones are almost all painted on beach rocks that we find on local beaches around Port Townsend and sometimes out on the Pacific Coast.

The only stones we bring home are the ones that are flat enough and smooth enough to take a detailed painted design.

Although you might look out across a beach covered with loose stones, only a tiny tiny percentage of what you see will actually be a smooth stone. Most stones have tiny cracks in them, or they are uneven in some way, or irregularly shaped, or they have dimples and bumps in them that make it impossible to accurately paint tiny lines.

Cracks, in particular, are the enemy of detailed design. Whenever paint hits a crack in a stone it fans out like a lightning bolt and immediately your design is destroyed.

Most Alchemy Stones are painted on near black rocks that we pick up, 90% of which are basalt... which polishes up extremely smoothly in surf. Most pale stones tend to have a high quartz content, which also means there are almost always tiny cracks and fissures between the individual quartz crystals or grains.

From time to time I've been asked why I don't paint on "other colored stones" and the answer is invariably that it's almost impossible to find any that are smooth enough to paint.

Certainly, you may have seen painted stones of many kinds and colors if you belong to a local rock painting group, but that only works if you're painting larger areas in a solid color or very broad line designs.

Occasionally I'm fortunate enough to find a pale stone that is smooth enough to be painted on. However, pale stones account for only maybe 5-10% of all Alchemy Stones. While a pale stone might be unusual, it makes them neither "rare" nor "better" than their darker counterparts.

It does make them different in the sense that I get to work with a new set of color contrasts, and some people by far prefer the paleish stones because of this. For me, working with them offers a nice change from what I am usually doing!