King’s & Video Blue: The Essential Palette
Are blue tints, such as our King’s and Video Blue, essential colors for your palette or only supplemental mixtures, merely for convenience?
True, our King’s Blue, for instance, is Ultramarine tinted with white. But when it is purchased already mixed, the result is brighter than what you can achieve with your palette knife since we work directly with the dry pigment, and greater pressure, allowing the beauty of the Ultramarine pigment to shine through.
Color is more consistent, too, and ready to go should you want that same mixture again for another painting.
Best of all, our King’s Blue and Video Blue are richly pigmented. They easily create unique greens and violets or distinctive neutrals and can modify both value and tone. As tints, our King’s Blue and Video Blue are easy to control in mixtures so you can make subtle changes to other colors but also dramatic ones.
Here’s but a few examples of why King’s and Video Blue can be reliable, go-to mixtures that are indispensable for mixing:
King’s Blue
Bright and luminous, our King’s Blue is warm in hue yet mixes beautifully with both cool and/or other warm colors.
When mixed with very deep and/or strong colors, like those in the examples below, King’s Blue offers a way to control these intense modern pigments like Phthalo’s and Quinacridones, and to bring out their otherwise hidden beauty.
with King’s Blue squirted out at bottom.
Notice how King’s Blue has created a whole range of more nuanced lavenders with just the Dioxazine, at middle left, and delicate blue pinks with just the Ruby Red, at upper right.
There’s also a nice mixture happening along the bottom center between the Dioxazine Purple and the Ruby Red, into which the King’s Blue has been also mixed for colorful red violets, at middle center.
Video Blue
Deep in value and very strong, our cool mixing Video Blue can brighten dark colors and is even useful for creating other blues by bending the value and tone of an Ultramarine or a Prussian Blue … but be sure to use a small amount of our powerhouse Video Blue!
Because our Video Blue is a tint, the Titanium White it contains adds nuance when it comes to mixing it with other bright primaries. In the examples below, mixing our Video Blue results in far more natural greens, when mixed with the Cadmium Yellows, than what you would get if you mixed Phthalo Blue with these bright yellows. You could almost think of it as a stand-in for a Cerulean Blue on your palette.
Similar to a “Sevres Blue” mix, we invented the name Video Blue for this mixture in our early years, back on Prince St., when the latest Art in America magazine at the time, the video issue, was discussing painting as an art form in decline. Long live painting!
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