I worked with Karen Vaughan, soil scientist, and paintmaker, to select ten colors inspired by the glacier-carved landscape of Alaska’s Kenai Fjords, where I’ve instructed with Inspiring Girls* Expeditions. These colors capture the elements of earth, sea, rock, ice, and vegetation of the coastal mountains.

Maria Coryell-Martin, Art Toolkit founder

Mix a range of blues for big skies and mineral-rich icy waters. Create rocky textures with Sundowner, Hematite, and Basalt, and mix colors into Sprout for varied vegetation. Use soft purples for shadows or sunset with Sundowner, and create white accents with Titania for snow-capped peaks and icebergs. Explore, experiment, and have fun!

These are handmade paints and may show irregularities in their dried form that do not affect their quality and performance.

Inspiring Girls* Expeditions leads tuition-free multi-day expeditions for high school girls* that interweave science, art, and backcountry travel. Led by professional women scientists, artists, and wilderness guides, the teams engage in scientific and artistic inquiry about the environment around them. Art Toolkit founder Maria Coryell-Martin has supported the program as an instructor and advisor since 2009. Learn more about the impact every donation will make, and discover how to get involved on the Inspiring Girls* website.

Your donation has an impact!

* Inspiring Girls* Expeditions welcomes cisgender girls and transgender, agender, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and genderqueer youth.

Karen Vaughan has long been fascinated by color. She is an associate professor of soil science at the University of Wyoming as well as an artist, paint maker, and jill-of-all-trades at the Art of Soil. Karen is a classically trained pedologist whose research traverses applied environmental biogeochemistry and pedology through the exploration of soil evolution and ecosystem processes across scales. She also works collaboratively to explore the distribution and implications of diversity and inclusion within the field of soil science.

Karen is a community-taught pigment forager and paint maker and is thrilled to be on this mineral journey with all the other movers, shakers, creatives, and makers. When not working with soils, pigments, and paint, she can be found traversing the trails of southeastern Wyoming while trail running, skiing, biking, or wandering with her two children and husband.

See more of Karen’s work on the Art of Soil website.