Unable to walk for seven months after a boating accident in 2017, she couldn't paint, so she Googled, researching the history of watercolors from cave art to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Marsh spent her recovery time tweaking traditional Renaissance paint recipes, making her own hues from rock and mineral powders and natural colloid agents like gum arabic from the acacia tree. She weighed minuscule amounts of powdered pigments, binding each color by hand on a marble slab using a glass muller—a labor-intensive process that takes up to an hour of mulling for a single color. "Before commercial paints were a thing, all artists made their own paint," says Marsh, who started her retail wholesale art business, The Ocean Paper, in 2016. "It was an integral part of learning about color theory and painting. Most people don't do it anymore."
When Marsh was just getting back on her feet in 2018, she and her business partner, Josh Meneley, opened a storefront on Kauai. She featured her paintings and cards, throwing a couple of handmade hues on the shelf as an afterthought. Muted colors and plenty of pastels lent themselves to the soft, dreamy quality of her Hawaii landscapes and seascapes. "At first I was really nervous because my paints weren't like the big brands," she says. "When you open a palette of store-bought watercolors, they are crazy bright. If you paint those colors straight out of the tube, it will look like a little kid painted it because artists are expected to mix the colors themselves. A lot of people don't know how to do that, though, and it becomes too complicated." Marsh's toned-down paints took the guesswork out of mixing, and customers loved them. Through word of mouth and a few fateful encounters, Marsh's watercolors quickly gained a dedicated following around the world with both professional and hobby artists.
Kaji Bross paints a landscape using handmade watercolors from The Ocean Paper. Owner Michi Marsh started making her own paints during the pandemic, and they've since become sought-after by artists the world over.
Marsh started with twenty-four colors. That first month, she released 1,600 half-pans of paint online at $10-$12 apiece. They sold out in minutes. At one point she considered mechanizing the operation, but, she says, there's really no automated way to create the same buttery quality of handmade paints.
Though COVID forced the closure of The Ocean Paper's storefront in 2020, paint sales continued to grow online. Marsh now features 140 different colors in The Ocean Paper paint line, all hand-mulled by Marsh and Meneley. Artists can buy watercolor sets like "Old Hawaii," a six-color palette inspired by the dusty, red-dirt roads of Kauai towns like Waimea and Hanapepe, or the twelve-color "Kelp + Urchin" set inspired by the kelp forests of temperate oceans.
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