ICAD Days 28-36

Day 28 – Cobalt Blue (2) – PB28 – I just noticed that day 28 has a pigment number containing 28, that was a total fluke!  This is another handy single pigment colour, and a good cool mixing blue.  Cobalt oxide pigment is one of the more expensive pigments and has been in used since early 1800s.  It is extremely lightfast and a moderately intense blue.  It does unfortunately have quite a high drying shift in watercolour, making it dry much lighter, so add more layers, or buy it in acrylic form where it will have no drying shift.

Day 29 – Quinacridone Violet – PV19 – one of my favourites, and a very useful single pigment colour that can range in colour from brand to brand. It is often marketed as two distinct colours, a darker value, lower chroma, more lightfast version (this one) and a lighter value, higher chroma, less lightfast version (see below).

Day 30 – Quinacridone Permanent Rose PV19 – as you might have noticed, this colour uses the same pigment, PV19, as the one above but results in a totally different colour. This is the lighter value, higher chroma version of the same pigment, which makes great rose pinks, that may or may not be less lightfast.

Day 31 – Autumn Orange – PO36 – in this brand (Mijello) it has the name Autumn Orange.  I find that they name some of their paints oddly, for a lot of other brands this would be Permanent Vermillion and is a very intense red orange.  It may look a little less intense in this photo, and also in the watercolour version of the paint there is a slight drying shift so it does dry lighter.  I have noticed this far in my ICADs how much I am liking the oranges, and that was not expected!

Day 32 – Yellow Ochre (2) – PY42 – note that this is Yellow Ochre number 2 from this brand (Mijello) and they do have a Yellow Ochre number 1 which is not a single pigment.  The same applies to some of their other colours (see Cobalt Blue above).  Mijello is a Korean paint brand and I read somewhere that in Asia, people don’t like to mix their colours so much and prefer to use premixed convenient colours.  This may or may not be true, but Mijello do have a lot of premixed convenience colours which would normally be single pigment colours.  They are usually much cheaper and are absolutely fine to use for painting, but if you are mixing colours, you might not get the result you expect since you would be mixing multiple pigments together instead of just two or three.

Day 33 – Yellow Green – PG36, PY3 – OK so PG36 is commonly known as phthalo green (YS), and PY3 is arylide yellow. In Daniel Smith paint the resulting colour is called Phthalo Yellow Green but Mijello are just calling it Yellow Green.  It is an extremely bright lime green but the camera is not picking up the gorgeousness of this colour!  As it is a mix of two pigments, it can easily be made from the two colours above but I already had it as it came as part of a set, so I don’t need to make any myself just yet but when it runs out, I know I can.

Day 34 – Ultramarine Light – PB29 – this single pigment colour is also known as Ultramarine deep, French Ultramarine, Ultramarine GS, permanent blue and so on and it is an intense blue violet.  Mijello call theirs Ultramarine Light, and they do have an Ultramarine Deep that is a convenience colour.  Thanks to modern chemisty, this colour of blue is included in even the cheapest student grade palettes and is the modern colour match for lapis lazuli, a most sought after pigment made from the stone, it was worth multiple times its weight in gold to artists during medieval times. I have three different versions of this colour, this Mijello one, a Sennelier one and a Daniel Smith one.  In the sample below you can see a slight granulation but the Daniel Smith one has a much larger granulation effect which I love but didn’t want it on this ICAD.  PB29 is also a great colour mixer and can be used with Burnt Sienna to make a range of beautiful greys and used with magentas to make beautiful violets.  Try mixing it with Quin Magenta (PV122) or Quin Rose (PV19) – my Day 30 colour, and see what amazingly beautiful violets can be made.  One of these colours I have actually featured in my Day 36 ICAD below!

Day 35 – Amethyst Genuine – n/a – This is one of Daniel Smith’s Primatek colours, which are the “made from minerals” paint range, this one being made from genuine ground up Amethyst.  I chose this colour because I love it but there is little information available regarding how much Amethyst is actually in these paints or just how they are made, it’s all proprietary information ie secret!  The tinting strength is often low, meaning that you will use more paint and this paint is expensive compared to other paint in different series.  It also seems to lift very easily from the paper so it is less useful if painting in layers.  Just how much actual Amethyst is in the paint and how many additives are in there to make it work as paint?  Unknown. I will say though, that you can see some tiny specks of gold through the paint and there is some sediment presumably from the Amethyst mineral, but how much is not made public.   Some of these paints are very pricey, and for years I have been tempted by another paint in this range, Sleeping Beauty Turquoise, one of the pricey ones at approx £26 for just 7ml of paint, or occasionally up to 20% cheaper in a sale.  I love turquoise, and the idea that this paint is mined from the Sleeping Beauty Turquoise mine in California just conjures up so many fairytale romance ideas but I cannot justify paying that much money for a tiny tube of paint and so I continue to resist. Another reason is that having tested a sample of this Turquoise, I found it a bit disappointing, compared to the vibrant colours of other Turquoise paints, so I console myself with the fact that I would probably be massively disappointed and be full of buyer’s remorse if I did waste my money on it.

Day 36 – Rose of Ultramarine – PB29, PV19 – really, they had me at the name alone before I even tested this colour a few years ago lol.  This one is of course from Daniel Smith, and is a combination of two of his other colours, Ultramarine PB29 and Quin. Rose PV19, (both colours feature above) so it can be mixed if you feel like doing it yourself, just buy those two in tubes and let the experimentation begin!  I do have a tube of this premixed convenience colour though and this is what I used to paint this ICAD.  Because it uses Ultramarine, there is some granulation and separation of colours as the Ultramarine separates from the violet.  You can see this effect a little bit on the ICAD where the blue has separated out in various places.  It is not so obvious on the watercolour paper where it has been used as the hair colour as the paint has soaked into the paper instead of sitting on the top of the gessoed ICAD.