lead white

Titanium white is far more opaque, and in oil it has a gooey character. Zinc white has a working texture similar to lead white, but it is more transparent. A mixture of titanium white and zinc white can match the opacity of lead white, and has a nice working texture. Add a trace of raw sienna, and the mixture will have the warmth of pure lead white. The siena will also speed drying to match lead white.

Is it really so easy to imitate lead white? No. The character of a color is defined not only by how it appears as a pure color, but how it performs in a picture — e.g., in thin layers, in mixtures.

For example, mix lead white with a bit of black and you get a neutral gray, perfect for monochrome painting. Try the same with our modern mixture and you will get a cool gray, a color that can appear weak in some contexts. To make our cool gray neutral, more of the raw sienna would be needed. Thus, a given mixture of pigments will not suffice to match lead white under all circumstances; we need a different mixture for different situations.

These might seem like subtle differences, and perhaps they are. But in painting, the sum of subtle difference results in a not so subtle difference between sublime and lousy artwork. Which is not to say that lead white is better than the other whites, artistically speaking, but it is very different, and it is an important foundation of western art.

What were the colors of the old masters?

[22 April 2009] ]]> http://karlzipser.com/2009/03/how-to-imitate-lead-white-in-oil.html/feed 0 http://karlzipser.com/2009/03/what-were-the-colors-of-the-old-masters.html http://karlzipser.com/2009/03/what-were-the-colors-of-the-old-masters.html#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:15:50 +0000 Karl Zipser http://karlzipser.com/?p=1511
These are color samples of historical pigments that I used in my own oil paintings. A general observation: the historical western art pigments are more subdued than modern synthetic pigments. This has an important consequence for painting, namely, that in the past artists could work with the pigments, trying to show their characters in the best and most intense way. Modern pigments, by contrast, are loud and strident when used pure, meaning that the modern painter must continually fight against and obscure the intrinsic characters of the colors. For example, modern synthetic ultramarine blue — how many paintings have been spoiled by this saccharine color? Purified natural ultramarine, by contrast, is the loveliest color imaginable. [Here is an example of a painting using historical colors.]

madder red lake

red earth

vermilion

yellow earth

gold leaf

lead tin yellow

verdigris

azurite blue

ultramarine blue

vegetable black

lead white

Mimic with with a mixture of zinc and titanium whites and a bit of raw siena (read more).

These are the core colors used for oil and egg tempera painting from the early Renaissance well into the 19th century. Here are some other colors that were used:

• kermes lake (a cool red lake)
• lac lake (similar to kermes)
• indigo (dark blue)
• green earth (soft green)
• orpiment (bright yellow/orange, poisonous)
• malachite (green)
• copper resinate (a moss-green, modified verdigris)
• white chalk (used in painting grounds)

In my next post I will discuss how to mimic these with modern colors, and the difficulties therein.

[19 April 2009]

These natural blue colors are intense, but not so intense as modern synthetic colors. This meant that painters of past centuries could strive to produce the strongest blues possible, and still arrive at results that were poetic, rather than garish. In contrast, the modern painter, working with colors from a tube, must often fight with the colors, to take away some of their overpowering intensity.

The painting here is an “imaginary portrait” which I painted with oil on panel in 2002. The blues here are underpainted in azurite, and overpainted with natural purified ultramarine, using varying admixtures of white. Differences in the pigment particle size and the degree of purification have an important influence on the colors.

Below are two magnfied views of the painting. In each detail, there is small regions of the warm blue azurite underpainting visible, where the ultramarine (darker blue) does not cover the underpainting completely. Notice the granular quality of the blue pigments, compared to the more uniform mixtures in the skin colors.

(first posted 14 March 2006; update with magnified views, 3 November 2006)