May Newsletter: The color of yellow

As I write this article this afternoon, I am sitting in a Starbucks Cafe in the Taw Hill area near Swindon, England (70 miles west of London). I'm here to visit friends after the Mediterranean sketching trip. It was a fun cruise and I think everyone in the party, ten--including myself, enjoyed themselves. 


This Starbucks is located upstairs inside a clothing shop, which used to be Borders. Everything looks and smells the same. I could be in Portland, if I didn't know any different. Well, maybe not,  I think the English accents would give it away. 


Right, we are discussing the pigment yellow this month. The brightest color on the color wheel, yellow conjures up all sorts of images: happiness, optimism, enthusiasm, sunny days (oh where have they gone) and so on. 


Years ago, I worked for a group of psychologists, who wanted me to put together a brochure for them. But first they asked me to do a color study to decide what theme they wanted. It was a fascinating assignment, but hard as there wasn't much information available back then (way before the birth of the Internet). What I found was that red and yellow stimulate the nervous system. These colors can even dilate the eye, creating energy and excitement. Next time you go into a supermarket notice the package colors. There's a reason for all those yellows and reds. Knowing this,  you can probably see why bright warm colors come forward in painting and cool colors seem to move backward.


The earliest yellow pigment was yellow orche. According to Wikipedia:

Ochres are among the earliest pigments used by mankind, derived from naturally tinted clay containing mineral oxides. Chemically, it is hydrated iron (III) oxide, mineralogically known as limonite. Modern artists' pigments continue to use the terms "yellow ochre" and "red ochre" for specific hues.

More than 75,000 years ago humans were using yellow orche (also known as Mars yellow) in their caves in South Africa to illustrate their lives. While this pigment created a somewhat dark yellow, it wasn't  (and still isn't) very brilliant. In fact, it's quite earthy.

Orpiment, a common monoclinic
arsenic sulfide mineral

To develop a more brilliant color, ancients used a highly-toxic mineral called orpiment, which was in use up to the 19the century. During the Middle Ages, Europeans used lead tin yellow, but again this was highly toxic. Then from India came a better yellow called Indian Yellow. Unfortunately, the pigment came from the urine of cows who were forced fed mango leaves--outlawed in the 1920s by the Indian government.


As with the other pigments we've studied so far, it was chemistry that really expanded the yellow pigment. Naples yellow is considered one of the oldest synthetic pigments, but is highly toxic and is today created by several different mixtures. Are you getting this theme here that earlier pigments usually ended up being found to be toxic. I wonder how artists managed to live through it all.


The mid-19th century saw the birth of lemon yellow, cadmium yellow and chrome yellow. Of the three, only lemon yellow was not found to be toxic. Cad yellow and chrome yellow have been replaced by other yellows. In particular, cad yellow is being replace by Azo, also known as arylide or Hansa Yellow. 


Gamboge is a orange-yellow that was originally form Cambodia and was used in the far east since the 8th century. It's been used by the West since the 1600s. And believe it or not, is not considered toxic!


I learned a lot from creating my own yellow paint chart this past month, learning that yellow can range from warm (more red) to very cool (a greenish yellow). It's been fun to take my own paints to see what I have in my arsenal for future paintings. Below are the scans from my color book. Unfortunately, colors don't exactly match what are in my book, but they're close. What amazes me is how brownish yellow orche can get and how orangey other colors can be as well. What will you chart look like??

Next month, I'll cover earth colors, black and white.

Color Study Party III Blue

Blue has been my favorite color ever since my childhood.  I’ve always leaned towards it, in my clothing, my makeup and even home furnishings. It’s not the coolness of the color that I particularly like, but instead, it’s the calming sense of rest. While I am still attached to the color, I have begun to expand my horizons to include more reds and yellows these days. In fact, I have a red sofa and lounge chair—amazing! So unlike Pablo Picasso, it took me about 40 years to end my blue period.

Blue is a fun color to read and write about because it’s interesting, especially its history. To me, blue seems to be all around us from the cerulean skies (okay maybe not always in Oregon) to the big blue Pacific. So you’d think that the color would easily find its way into literature. But strangely, blue is not mentioned in many ancient writings, including those from India, China, even in Homer’s Iliad and most surprisingly the Bible. 

According to Dov Michaeli, MD, PhD., former professor at the University of California San Francisco, the Hebrews used “the color ‘tehelet’, which…was wrongly thought to mean blue. It is now known to be the color purple, extracted from sea shells found on the beaches of Israel and Lebanon.”

Other colors are mentioned but no one really knows why blue is absent. Of course, there are lots of theories. The only one that makes sense to me is that the ancients only talked about colors that were important for survival, i.e., red for fire or poisoned berries, black for night, danger, etc. If you want to learn more about this mysterious phenomenon, go to the following article authored by Dr. Dov Michaeli: The Evolution of the Color Blue. Very bizarre.

The Pigment
While the color blue may not have been mentioned in early literature, it sure didn’t lose any attention in the form of the visual art. Egyptians created the blue pigment from copper silicates and calcium oxide. While it was a great start, it was highly fugitive, sometimes turning black. The Romans called it, Egyptian blue and it was worn by many public servants. It is believed this practice was the origin of the blue uniform worn by police.

Azurite, photo credit: Eric Hunt

Beyond the Egyptian blue, there was also azurite. A deep blue, leaning toward green, it was used during the medieval period up to and including the 15^th century. The pigment offered a wide flexibility in its ability to create a variety of different blues depending on the manufacturing process. Best of all, there was plenty of it in Europe.

The making a woad ball: http://www.woad.org.uk/html/woad_balls.html

A darker blue pigment, close to shade of indigo, was used in the British Isles, named woad. Warriors would use this pigment as face paint to strike fear in their enemies hearts, the most famous being Julius Caesar in 55 B.C. Woad was also used by the Irish monks for blue in the Books of Kells.

Natural Ultramarine Blue

While Europe was limited to their native blue pigments, the best was being used in Asia in the form of lapis lazuli—a somewhat rare, semi-precious stone found in Afghanistan. When the stone is ground up and turned into a pigment, we know it as ultramarine, which means “beyond the sea.” The pigment was used in Asia in the 5^th and 6^th centuries but gained major popularity during the European Renaissance era. Extremely expensive to manufacture, ultramarine was used sparely by most artists, leaving it for the Madonna’s and Christ child’s clothing in paintings.

Another blue import was the color indigo found in India. An organic pigment from the indigofera tinctorum plant, indigo has a deep bluish/purple quality to it. It is 30 times stronger than woad but usually fugitive (not colorfast).

Block of indigo by Evan Izer

By the 19^th century, blue pigments were being manufactured synthetically, which gave artists a wide range of color and at a cheaper cost—Prussian blue was the first to be synthesized, followed by cobalt and cerulean blue. Then in 1824, the  Societé pour l'Encouragement d'Industrie offered a prize to any chemist who could create a synthetic ultramarine. Six years later Jean Baptiste Guimet won the prize, and thus gave birth to the pigment French ultramarine.

Here are some other quick facts about blue

• One of the primary colors, coldest color on the wheel, creates secondary colors with other primaries.
• Complementary to orange, orange-yellow and yellow.
• Ultramarine blue: deep blue with slight reddish cast, transparent.
• Cobalt: similar to ultramarine with a lightly greenish tone.
• Cerulean: deep azure blue, opaque, good tinting/hiding power, great for skies and water.
• Prussian: deep blue, slightly greenish, glazes and tints, transparent
• Manganese: bright greenish blue, similar to cerulean but lighter, less tinting strength
• Phthalo: a modern synthetic, intense, powerful color similar to Prussian, also known as Winsor blue.

As I did last month, I took all the blues I have and put them in my color book. There were no big surprises for me, although I have to say, I was intrigued by Daniel Smith’s lunar blue and Schminke’s Paynes grey, blue—both watercolors. They seem to be the same, but with different names. 

On the acrylics side, I am still a great believer in Atelier’s paints by Chroma. Along with being smooth and creamy with fairly good coverage, the paint takes a while to dry, giving me more time to play. What’s more, you can purchase an unlocking medium, which will let you “unlock” your acrylic paint on the canvas for up to seven days. I like the option of changing my mind without having to paint over the area again with gesso. If you’d like more information on Atelier paints go to their website: www.atelier.com.

Next month: Yellow.