What to do when no paint at hand? Paint with what you have. Or find in the kitchen, like tea and beetroot! Claudia Hahn demonstrates that expensive art materials are no necessity to create wonderful art, with colours everyone can easily source from things we find in our kitchens or outdoors. It is easy to forget that in the not too distant past, all dyes and paints had to be obtained from the natural world, directly from minerals and plants. The resulting colours may not be as bright as those from artificial sources, but they have a beauty and gentle subtlety of their own.

Part of the beauty of working with natural pigments is they are very unpredictable. The limitations of a restricted palette also demand that one becomes more imaginative in the way one uses the colours; Deeper, richer tones can be achieved by layering the paint for example, rather than simply reaching for another colour shade as we might normally do.