Myself Ramesh, doing Mithila painting. I want to ask one thing about colours but first I will tell what happened.

For the peacock body I use a blue from the nil plant, dried and powdered by my own hand. Old stock was finished. New batch I got from a man in Darbhanga and the blue is coming out flat, like the blue of a plastic bucket, no depth at all. I mixed with a little of the black from lamp soot and the whole thing went grey and dull. Today I took handmade paper, that sheet I keep only for testing colours, and I painted the whole thing over with the new blue in different strengths, twelve patches, one to twelve. Still nothing.

The old blue in my mind is the colour of a peacock neck in shade, deep but alive. This one is only sitting there on the paper, doing nothing.

Trouble is I have the full border already done in the old blue, fine line, three days of work, and the peacock body will come in the middle. If I use new blue it will not match and the whole painting is spoiled. If I wait for old stock, maybe months, maybe never. Someone told me to use the acrylic blue from the market. Colour will be correct but for me it is not the same work then.

Anybody else faced this with natural pigment, one batch gone and the new one not matching? How you manage? I am not asking for sympathy only, I want to know what to actually do.