While Nila Colori®'s activity is on pause, Carlo Ferrara still teaches courses and workshops on preparing traditional paints with natural pigments, upon request.
The workshops cover both theory and practice, with hands-on demonstrations and experiments. The focus is on preparing paints — watercolor, egg tempera, casein paint, lime paint and other similar techniques — starting from vegetable and mineral pigments: natural earths (ochre, sienna), lapis lazuli, azurite, malachite.
The basics of the pigments behind these paints are also covered — history, mineral or vegetable origin, characteristics — but the heart of the course remains the hands-on preparation of the paint itself.
The most common format is an intensive two-day weekend (typically Saturday and Sunday, with theory in the morning and practice for the rest of the day), though the program adapts to whoever is organizing the course and the audience involved.
Past editions include workshops in Rome in collaboration with Bilulu, in Marzabotto (Bologna) with Il Giardino di Pimpinella, in Milan at Officina del Colore, in Palermo with Insula, as well as editions in Florence and Naples.