Our highly pigmented Cadmium Yellows

 

Our highly pigmented Cadmium Yellows are buttery smooth, brilliant, and strong.

 

Long and ready for your brush                     

We mill our paint with the highest pigment load possible. Soft metallic pigments, such as the cadmiums, turn out buttery and long in consistency at this high pigment level.

The addition of chalk-like additives and extenders would easily produce a dry, heavier and dense paint, but the color strength and beauty would be sacrificed. Even though these fillers are considered “pigments” in the paint industry, we don’t use them, causing our paint to go further, physically and visually, and be more useful for direct painting.

This is why Vasari Classic Artists’ Oil Colors are so different in handling compared to other brands. Many artists find it “freeing” to just paint and not need a medium to make the color more fluid or lush. Others find it challenging to use a looser consistency Cadmium.

Traditional wood palettes are helpful. Cadmiums and other 19^th century mineral colors are best kept with the cap facing downward to avoid oil separation in the tube when not in use or for long term storage.

 

Highly pigmented for maximum light and opacity

In addition to their buttery consistency, our highly pigmented Cadmium Yellows are intensely luminous. They are pure color. As primary yellows on a palette, they will be rich and opaque in mixing, yet very natural, without loosing their color strength.

Cadmium Yellow Lemon is so bright and opaque that it mixes like a cold white. It will easily produce a much lighter mixture than a warmer Cadmium Yellow, and the mixture will be spatially more distinct.

Cadmium Yellow Lemon, Cadmium Yellow Light, and Cadmium Yellow each mixed with the medium deep and somewhat neutral Chromium Oxide. Resulting yellow green mixtures are all more glowing but get deeper in value as the yellows get warmer in tone.

 

The powerful glow of our Cadmium Yellow Lemon will shine through transparent and semi-transparent dark earths, or our warm Ivory Black, for a wide range of delicate yellow greens still rich in color.

Cadmium Yellow Lemon mixed with our Ivory Black on the left and with our Cyprus Umber-Green on the right.

 

Here are a few examples Monet’s use of Cadmium Yellows to capture nature’s light and warmth. Click on the links for each work below, at the Art Institute of Chicago, to learn more:

Apples and Grapes, Claude Monet 1880, oil on canvas, 26.25 x 32.5

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/16549?search_no=2&index=4

 

 

The Cliff Walk at Pourville, Claude Monet 1882, oil on canvas, 26.25 x 32.5

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/14620?search_no=23&index=2

 

Bordighera, Claude Monet 1884, oil on canvas, 25.5 x 31.75

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/81537?search_no=7&index=31

Establishing Warm or Cool

Using a few of our highly pigmented Cadmium Yellows to demonstrate, here’s a previous discussion of what I regard as the three most important attributes of color, especially for successful color mixing. Easily observed, these properties of pigments include the color’s temperature, its physical nature, and its material nature.

I often say that defining a color’s temperature, whether it is warm or cool, is critical to understanding how it will influence and possibly work, or not work, in a mixture.

Showing examples of our Cadmium Yellow Lemon, as my cool mixing yellow and Cadmium Yellow as a warmer yellow, I emphasized that a cool mixing color is one that is somewhat green or moving towards green on a color wheel. Conversely, a warm color is one that is somewhat red or moving towards red on a color wheel.

Why would it matter? When using more traditional colors on a palette, such as Cadmiums or Cobalts, the best rule of thumb is to mix a cool color with a warm color for predictable results.

In this demonstration I set out to mix greens from various combinations of yellow and blue. That meant I needed a cool yellow if my blue was warm in temperature, such as an Ultramarine Blue. It also meant that if I wanted to use the warmer yellow, our medium Cadmium Yellow, I needed to mix it with a cool blue, such as a Cerulean Blue. Above is the resulting green from following the rule.

Breaking the rule of mixing a cool with a warm happens when I mix the warm Cadmium Yellow with the warm Ultramarine Blue. In fact this is a good test to see if your blue is warm or cool, since the warmer blue will not result in a clean green, but rather one that is earthier and more neutral, as in the example above.

But I could mix the cool yellow with the cool blue and produce believable greens. This is because a cool mixing yellow makes greens that look green with any temperature blue, warm or cool, making it an ideal primary for a plein air palette. A cool mixing blue will also make believable greens with any yellow, also a great addition to a plein air palette. You can think of both of these choices of cool primaries as moving towards greens and great for making greens.

Opaque or Transparent

Both of the Cadmium Yellows used to demonstrate color temperature were also characteristically opaque. This property of the Cadmium pigment, especially when the Cadmium is a pale yellow can dramatically shift the value of a deeper blue in the resulting green mixture. It acts like a white!

We can observe this in the previous mixture between Cadmium Yellow Lemon and Ultramarine Blue, repeated below.

You can determine if your yellow, or any of your other primaries or earths, etc., are opaque by smoothing an amount with a palette knife over a lined sheet of paper, or one that has text printed in black against a white background. An opaque color will cover up the lines with one pass. A transparent color will show the lines below it.

In the examples above, the opaque Cadmium Yellow Lemon is more solid with a definite edge while the transparent Sulphur Yellow has more dimension with lost-and-found edges. Examples of greens mixed with the transparent Sulphur Yellow are shown below.

Each of these mixtures are deeper in value since a transparent color allows more of the other color in a mixture to show through.  An opaque color does the opposite as it dominates a mixture and covers over the other color, just as it does on a test sheet of lines. You can use transparent yellows to create deeper greens instead of having to deepen a green mixture.

Nuanced or Bold – What’s in that tube of paint?

Besides a color’s temperature and whether or not it is opaque or transparent, mixtures are also influenced by the material nature of the colors used.

The Sulphur Yellow is also a modern color based on a permanent synthetic pigment. You can tell because even when mixed with a traditional mineral color, like the Cerulean Blue, (shown above) the resulting green mixture is bright as well as deeper than with the Cadmium Yellow Lemon. That can be useful when you want to bring attention to a passage in the painting.

Modern colors make very clean mixtures and when two of them are combined, then the mix really gets bold and consequently comes forward in space. Let’s bring in a few more of the modern blues and a warmer yellow to compare with the Cadmiums, Cerulean, and Ultramarine we already mixed.

Here is our Indian Yellow, a warm, transparent modern pigment. Add white and it pops. It comes forward in space. Use it to break the rule of cool plus warm and watch a brighter, deep green emerge when we mix it with the also warm Ultramarine Blue.

Mix the warm Indian Yellow with a more modern warm blue, our Phthalo Blue, red shade…. It hardly seems like any rules were broken here. A very rich green (shown below).

Let’s try a modern cool mixing blue, our Phthalo Blue, green shade with both of our transparent modern cool and warm yellows:

Again, clean mixtures and lots of brightness but flatter space. Modern pigments allow more freedom in mixing warms with warms and often exaggerate mixtures of cools plus warms and cools plus cools. So how can we have the best of both worlds: clean color but believable space and natural light?

Developing Strategies to Create Space

Bright mixtures that are cool in temperature and are also fairly opaque will create definite edges. To create a sense of light and atmosphere the strategy must include adding warmth and softening or even disrupting those edges. For a form to recede in space it must have lost-and-found edges and a sense of air in front of it. Here are some ideas:

Use a mix of traditional and modern primaries. Try to seek out authentic mineral colors, like our Cerulean Blue, that will act as a modifier to the brighter mixture (shown above). Cerulean Blue can only do this if it doesn’t contain any of the modern Phthalo pigment.

Natural earth colors are very good at neutralizing the modern pigments. Here’s a cold bright mixture nuanced slightly warmer with our French Yellow Ochre Havane, a half-burnt yellow earth that is both transparent and warm (shown above).

Use a premixed gray already formulated to depict light and/or shadow at a distance. Our Ship Rock is a warm medium light gray that can push back against the brightness and add dimension and a sense of humidity to the mixture. Our Jasper invades mixtures with deep shadow as it blankets over the brightness and diffuses edges. Both of these grays are opaque so they have the ability to dominate the bright green mixture shown in the images above.

Visit an earlier post for more ways to modify brightness and create a sense of natural light or shadow with our grays featuring Bluff, Jasper and Cedar.