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COLOR
A history of paint color
If this text had been written ten or twenty years ago it would read very differently. Until the 1990s, ideas about what went into paint were conjectural and there were only a handful of respected academics around the world who concerned themselves with this somewhat abstruse subject. That has all changed. Painters and conservators used to cut back paint to see what the old colors were, by performing a "scrape". This technique has been responsible for the formulation of several "historically researched" paint ranges that have now been proved rather inaccurate, thanks to the introduction of techniques and technologies that have been developed in the fine art world and transferred to the sphere of decoration. Nowadays, a paint analyst will use a polarizing microscope, chromatography, and mass spectrometry to identify the constituent pigments and binders in a paint sample. The sample is a cross section of paint layers made by embedding a paint chip in a block of resin and then cutting it through. Because of such analysis, more old houses are now receiving appropriate color treatments. If you are keen to find out exactly how your house was painted a hundred or two hundred years ago, enlist the help of a paint conservator or the conservation department of a local museum to help you make an analysis.
The contemporary world of building conservation is fraught with personal agendas and the egos of those involved, and over the last decade or two, paint experts have wasted a great deal of time and public money debating the precise shade of color with which old houses were painted -- taking very imprecise names such as "Wainscot" or "Pearl". In truth, it seems that since the decorator usually mixed the paint on site, colors varied enormously. The paint historian Patrick Baty quotes the following seventeenth-century account: "Leaves to be brought to the architect whereof to make his choice as to the color. The colors for rooms ought not to be taken at random but to be chosen according to the much or little light, or space of the place etc".
The most interesting revelation in the past ten years has been just how many grand homes of the past were painted in bright colors. Indeed, if a fashionable home owner of any century between the fifteenth and nineteenth could obtain unusual and bright colors of paint, he would use them, not least because of their novelty value.
Ordinary vernacular houses were painted in somewhat dingy colors, mainly derived from local earths (although these earth colors found use in the grander buildings too) colored with iron oxides or copper compounds to provide a palette that changed little for five hundred years from the beginning of the fifteenth century onwards. It is only in this century that we have obliterated the colors of the past and lost touch with our history.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
One thing, however, is sure. Thanks to old accounts and receipts (recipes) combined with the available technology for paint analysis today, it is possible to determine exactly which pigments were available to the decorators of the past. By employing the same colors and mixing them, we too can begin to approximate the colors they produced and make the types and colors of paint that they used.
But why should we bother? Surely modern paint ranges offer every conceivable color in very consumer-friendly paints? And are we not getting hung-up on the past for its own sake, pursuing a nostalgia for "dirtied" romantic historical interiors, out of some atavistic navel-inspection? In a world of increasing complexity and threat, the domesticity of our homes inevitably offers us the easy option to escape the twenty-first century, and not create it. Shouldn't we really be forging and refashioning our new culture, not relying on one that was extinguished two or more centuries ago? To answer these questions, there are two points that are worth considering.
First, we should note that if we are to learn from the past (a necessary process to move forward), we must ensure that what we see as history is as accurately represented as possible. When it comes to the subject of how color has been managed historically and applied inside and outside our buildings, our ancestors have had an 8,000-year head start on us. There ought to be something we can learn from them.
Second, the colors they used were certainly limited by what was available; but they were also colors that were derived from the same sources as the buildings themselves; from rocks, clays, and minerals. Thus the buildings they constructed "grew" out of the soil and were dressed with pigments that came from the natural world. What is interesting is that despite modern technology, it is not possible to use synthetic dyes to reproduce all the particular qualities of a paint colored with an earth pigment. The pigment granules are not dispersed in the same way and the result is a lifeless plastic coating. Traditional pigments, however, impart a subtle movement and life to a painted surface (see pages 250-6) and they also come with a proven track record of use and success. If, for example, you want to mix an excellent cream to paint your walls, use yellow ochre; it is just about the most ancient pigment there is. Like the family of earth colors to which it belongs, it is not simply a "historical" color, but one universally recognized as of immense value to the artist and decorator alike.
The colors on the following pages represent this core of ancient pigments that have proved their pedigree over thousands of years. If we want to decorate our private and public buildings well, surround ourselves with good colors and make the decoration of our homes sing, we should look to these colors as the way to do it.
Regional colors
"If you want to paint the outside of your house, get your neighbor to choose the colors." Thus writes the eminent authority Jean Philippe Lenclos about the sensitivity surrounding the use of color in our lives and the way in which we all bear a responsibility for properly integrating our homes into the built -- and natural -- environments.
The quote is underpinned by a truth about color that I believe is much overlooked; that its psychological effect and significance is intimately bound to our culture. There is a connection between the colors we surround ourselves with and the way we live our lives. Historically, societies have even been visually stratified into their classes by the use of color on architecture cheap and expensive colors in correspondingly cheap and expensive houses. Yet the same societies have found themselves united under the colors of their national flags in times of stress. Color means power because color exercises such a powerfully emotional influence upon us in our homes and everyday lives.
Just as colors are historical, so do they belong to different regions of the world. The essential core of colors that has been in use for several thousand years comprises about eight earth colors made from clay colored with iron oxide and a few copper-based pigments for blue and green. They are to be found on virtually every continent on the globe, are the most stable common coloring matters, and because they are readily available and require little processing, have always been obtainable, cheap and therefore much used. The Pennsylvanian Dutch settlers did not have to change the vocabulary of colors of their native Swiss and German painted furniture when they moved across the Atlantic because similar pigments were readily available in the New World.
Yet from region to region within a continent, the color palette subtly changes. This is particularly true within towns and cities where the use of pigments peculiar to an area has always helped to define a sense of place and has developed parallel to the architecture of that area. The Mexican town of Guanajuato, for example, is colored with pigments of ochres and browns that tell the story of its native Indian and Spanish influences, while the towns above Passau in Germany have, over several centuries, developed a vocabulary of strong pastel colors on the outside of their buildings, delineated with white.
COLOR CHAOS
This sense of place and belonging is all being speedily eroded by an attitude and advertising culture which favours brash plastic colors for signage, and uniform building materials and colors for modern developments. Housing developments in Miami, Scotland, and the suburbs of Paris are nowadays often built to look the same, not different, with no regard for traditional building methods, materials, or colors for the particular area. An almost unlimited range of synthetic colors is available for the homeowner and architect and the resultant effect is of what has been termed "color chaos" or "color pollution" in our communities. As the architect and colorist Michael Lancaster puts it, "Because we lack confidence in the use of color, we tend to use it either timidly or brashly, and rarely with any understanding or control of the total effect. We need to develop greater ability to see how it can be used as a powerful and creative means of architectural and townscape expression to create a better, more satisfying environment. We should also remember that it is flexible, easy to change, and cheap."
But luckily, the tide is turning thanks to the concerted efforts of a band of enthusiastic architects, planners and even paint manufacturers. The company Akzo, through their research arm, the Sikkens foundation, has for many years been sponsoring and developing color programs in several cities throughout Europe. These have taken place in Berlin, Norwich, Turin and, most famously, the Rambla area in the center of Barcelona which was re-branded with a traditional color palette on the outside of its buildings in time for the Olympic Games to be held there.
DEFINING COMMUNITIES
Predictably, many of the regional decorating colors that have been traditionally used by man are earth colors. Using the earth colors illustrated on the following pages (see pages 18-31), I can reproduce the paint colors of the Pueblo Indians of Santa Fe, or alternatively the red ochre and burnt sienna limewashes used to cover the houses of the Western Sahara.
But to say that all regional colors are the same earth colors is wrong. In the Souss plain of Morocco, it is the combination of rusty brown, delicate pink and deep brown ochre that dominates the townscapes and villages. Yellow is not used, nor umber colors -- in fact, the soil is the color of raw umber, but pigments to color the buildings are brought from the mountains. Indeed, the use of pinks and red ochres (made from both purplish red ochre and warm red ochre) is absolutely unremitting, covering every surface of every building. From the perimeter walls and buildings of these mud cities and villages, the inhabitants have sent a strong and clear visual signal across the surrounding plains -- that the people who live there, in choosing common colors, have more or less chosen a common identity, that they are a community.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that the sense of community and place so strongly created by these red ochre limewashes is something we can also reproduce in our own lives and communities by reviving the local colors that our forebears knew. As, in the western world, we witness the breaking up of our communities through all kinds of social upheaval, it is a cheering thought that around us lie hidden clues as to how our communities identified themselves in the past, and how they might do so again in the future.
Essential colors
There are about 900,000 paint colors in production, a figure that is barely comprehensible. And they are all produced synthetically, using carefully matched azo dyes and synthetic pigments that rely on modern petroleum and coal-tar chemistry, including at least forty which are considered totally permanent. Yet, despite this enormous choice, our ability to choose good colors and design decorative schemes is not improved. We still make mistakes over the most trivial matters and our queries remain unanswered; such as what constitutes a good cream paint color and what exactly is that powerful blue I saw all over the buildings in Portugal on my vacation?
The answer must be not to increase the number of available colors even further, and not to try to explain or group the colors any more. That has been done by several manufacturers according to the Munsell system (see page 256) and we are still none the wiser. Nor is the answer to dream up ever-more evocative names for the colors (although I do like the nineteenth-century color name, Gallstone). Instead, perhaps the answer lies in the way that pigments and colors have been used historically.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, on the whole, paints were manufactured using true pigments, powders that were mineral in origin and dug out of the ground (inorganic) or were processed from vegetable matter or animal bones (organic). Because the sources were limited, so the decorator's and artist's palettes were limited; greens were, and to some extent still are, difficult to produce. Pliny the Elder described in 50AD a decorator's palette that would have seemed perfectly adequate to the house painter of the 1890s: "The bright colors that the client supplies to the artist are bright red, rich blue, vermilion, green, indigo, and bright purple. The rest are dark. Of the whole palette some pigments are natural, some artificial. Natural colors are brown, red ochre, ruddle, white, chalk, white marl, Melian white and bright yellow. The rest are artificial. Among the commoner kinds are yellow ochre, burnt white lead, realgar, vermilion, Syrian red, and black."
The enforced color range of this traditional palette has also adopted a meaning over the last six thousand years. Because the pigments (of which there exist only a dozen or so) came from the ground and the vegetation around us, and because they also color that same ground, and the rocks, marbles, and stones we walk on, everything that was painted with them took on something of the quality of the natural world.
What is so appealing about this decorative palette today is that it can, in the instant of application, reinvest our buildings, rooms and objects with those same resonances, of the real, material world.
At the same time, what is interesting is that these colors have tremendous appeal to so many people. Yellow ochre, for example, produces superb creams and soft buttery yellows of a number of shades, all of which are highly pleasing to the eye, unlike the vast majority of synthetically produced yellow paints. The reason for this is not coincidental. We all carry with us in our mind's eye the colors of our natural world, the seas, rocks, plants, and skies -- our easy visual relationship with the natural environment depends on a retina and visual cortex that for thousands of years have been slowly adapting to respond to the particular ranges of light frequencies that are produced in the world around us. It is for this reason that we can perceive minute changes in shades of green but not in red; red occurs so infrequently in nature that we are not genetically trained or equipped to perceive its subtleties.
It is therefore not surprising that naturally derived mineral pigments mean more to us; they carry more messages and remind us of so many different contexts.
THE EARTH PIGMENTS
The first eight of the following colors (see pages 18-31) are arranged to form an open collection of swatches, each of which was hand-painted to show the pigment color undiluted (across the center of the swatch); how the pigment responds when washed out to reveal the undertones (toward the top of the page), and how the pigment responds when mixed into white paint, in this case titanium white artist's acrylic paint (toward the bottom of the page).
These earth pigments are colored with iron oxides and form the essential historical core of pigments. Nearly all of them were in use in Minoan times, and they formed the decorative palette of the Romans, the medieval church painters, the vernacular house painters of the eighteenth century, and even the decorative painters of the early twentieth century. These pigments hold the key to successfully manipulating paint color in interior design.
THE RARER PIGMENTS
On pages 33-7 you will find another five colors that have been added from Roman times, through the Middle Ages and on to the eighteenth century. They have been chosen as being representative of the rarer, brighter colors that can be obtained. Together with the earth colors they form an entire decorative palette that would satisfy even a fine artist for his uses, and yet all from 13 colors.
All the techniques executed in this book were executed in these colors, and by way of further illustration as to their potential, pages 38-41 illustrate a variety of mixes to produce an enormous range of secondary colors.
COLOR AVAILABILITY
For each of the pigments described on pages 18-37, I list the names of the most readily available equivalent powders. They can be purchased from artist's and specialist paint suppliers (see pages 263-4), and these last also stock the universal stainers that are listed. I have not included any pigments with high toxicity levels.
PIGMENT TOXICITY
The most common pigments are given detailed toxicity ratings in the following section. Many references are made throughout the book to the health problems and dangers of handling pigments in powder form. Although many of them (the earth colors, for example) are considered relatively safe when handled as powders, you are strongly recommended never to handle any toxic pigments in powder form.
A number of specific medical terms are used in this section of the book to define the toxic effects of the pigments and materials discussed. These terms are:
Carcinogenic May cause cancer.
Mutagenic May cause hereditary mutation.
Teratogenic A substance that may cross the birth canal, causing birth defects.
Levels of exposure
There are no minimum exposure levels for substances known to have these effects. Instead, there are acute and chronic exposure levels. The definition of an acute exposure is a single-incident exposure where the substance usually takes immediate effect. Chronic exposure is where there are multiple exposures to a substance where the toxic effect is slowly built up.
Methods of exposure
The methods of exposure are:
Inhalation The breathing in of substances either in powder form or as fumes. They then enter the bloodstream via the lungs.
Ingestion Swallowing of substances which are passed into the blood from the digestive system.
Skin contact Usually the least harmful form of exposure, unless a substance collects under the nails to be later transferred onto food, or enters the bloodstream via a skin wound or cut.
Yellow ochre
The reason yellow ochre is first among these Essential Colors is that it is probably the most universal traditional pigment and has the widest number of uses in decoration. Of all the pigments available to man, ochre, as it was historically known, must be one of the most pleasurable to handle. In its finest form it is a warm, bright, and rich color with no hint of greenness about it and when blended with a liquid medium becomes a little transparent, a feature which renders yellow ochre very useful for glazing.
Yellow excites the retina and is often spurned as a decorative color because of the way it can upset our sense of visual balance. In northern climes especially, yellows have a tendency to green because gray skies transmit a predominantly blue light, slightly warping true color values. Consequently, yellow has virtually become the most difficult color to handle successfully in decoration.
But yellow ochre is our savior; its warmth ensures that whatever the climate, it will not tend to the green, an advantage that persists when mixed with white to form tints. In fact, it can safely be said that the best creams result from a mixture of yellow ochre and white; buildings all over the world bear witness to the universality of this truth. There simply is no better yellow for painting the outside of your house.
Interestingly, when mixed with white, yellow ochre loses some of the heat and mustard-like quality that it has in its pure powder form. It will consequently produce a rich golden yellow when mixed with a little white, and as more white is added, cooler, creamier tints. The swatch to the left, executed with pigment bound in a little gum arabic on watercolor paper, illustrates this point. The central bar of pure pigment is mixed into pure water towards the top of the page to form a graduated wash. You can see from this that even as it washes out, the yellow retains its strength and brilliance. Toward the bottom of the page, however, the ochre has been mixed with titanium white acrylic paint, an opaque and pure white that has the effect of dulling and warming the impact of the pigment. Thus it is possible to obtain a wide variety of yellows and creams from just one pigment.
ORIGINS
Any pigment that carries the description ochre must be prepared from natural earths, usually fine clays, that have been colored by the presence of a large quantity of iron oxides (ferrous oxide and ferric oxide), better known as rust.
Earth is centered on a vast magnetic molten core with a very high iron content. Where iron appears on the surface it is usually in an oxidized form, since iron is in its most unnatural state when it is pure. The way in which it wants to rust so willingly, and return to its natural state is testament to that. In fact, the only known locations where man has been able to mine pure iron is from inside meteorites.
When iron rusts, it adopts a fantastic range of colors from deep reds through yellows and oranges to black and even dark purple, and all these colors have at some time or other been extracted and used in painting. The exact color that the rust produces depends on the presence of heat and on the amount of water around; the more moisture, the yellower the color.
Yellow ochre is one of a small family of earth color pigments that rely on iron oxides to color them, and the rest of these can be found on the following pages -- red ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, terra verde, and raw umber. The yellows are found in Italy, America, France, and Britain, where the last remaining good supply, near Oxford (known as Oxford ochre), was mined and ground at a local windmill until the Second World War. France produces the best yellows, fine and pure and in their purest forms tending to a true golden cast; one of the best is known by its abbreviation JFLS, standing for jaune fin, lard, sur fin (fine yellow, washed, extra fine).
MAKING YOUR OWN PIGMENT
The word lavé, meaning washed, not only suggests that impurities have been removed, but that the pigment has been refined by a simple process known as levigation. The technique was known to the Romans and is simply explained. Take a small lump of strongly colored clay and leave it in a large coffee jar, with the lid on, soaking in water three times its volume for 30 minutes. Ensure you leave at least 1 inch of air at the top. Once the clay is broken down, shake the jar vigorously and then hold it still for a couple of seconds before pouring the contents into another jar. What remains in the bottom of the first jar are heavy lumps and impurities that settled out after shaking. By repeating the soaking process and waiting for successively longer periods before pouring, you will be able to separate finer and finer grades of pigment from the water. The pigments can be dried and then ground in the desired medium when the time comes for you to use them.
You may have encountered a similar yellow, named Mars yellow, which belongs to the Mars family of pseudo-earth colors. These are man-made iron oxide pigments that are cheap and plentiful, being the by-product of many common chemical processes and which form a useful contribution to the coloring of manufactured coatings. Their brilliance of color is often spurned by artists who prefer the quieter, more subtle qualities of the natural pigment.
THE ESSENTIALS OF YELLOW OCHRE
Commercially available as:
Yellow ochre, English ochre, French ochre, golden ochre, mineral yellow, yellow oxide, Mars yellow; yellow ochre universal stain.
Contents
Iron oxide, clay.
Toxicity
No significant hazards.
Uses
* For tempera panel painting as flesh tones when mixed with white and red ochre.
* In fresco work, since the pigment will not be affected or changed by chemical attack, including the action of alkaline salts present in damp lime plaster. This feature also renders yellow ochre useful as a colorant for cement and concrete, in plaster casting and in limewash.
* On the exterior of buildings, in limewash or in silicate paints where not only is it resistant to acid and alkali, but it will also not fade on exposure to ultraviolet light. (These powers of persistence are common to all earth colors.)
* Since the color approximates gold, yellow ochre is often applied underneath gold leaf or paint to mask any cracks in the leaf. Under water gilding, a soft, colored clay called bole is applied mixed with a little gelatin glue so that the leaf may be burnished once dry by polishing the bole through the leaf with a hard tool. The clay is really a cousin of the yellow ochre pigment, containing the same constituents but in differing proportions. Popular bole colors are red and yellow ochre, which are, and have often historically been, mixed to achieve a pleasing orange ochre.
* Yellow ochre may also be mixed with raw umber to produce interesting antiquing colors.
Real ochre
In terms of the colors of cities and buildings, red ochre must rank equal in importance with its sister, yellow ochre. Indeed, some would assert that the potency of red ochre places it as the most psychologically powerful color from the traditional palette that an architect might use. The fact that an enormous number of buildings in ancient Rome were painted this color supports this idea; even today, several districts of the Trastevere in Rome continue to feature buildings of a very uncompromising deep red-brown.
Red ochre suffers from a confusion of identity, mainly due to there being several varieties with different names. Mars red is a synthetic, pure version, and light red is a scarlet-tinged ochre. The latter can replace traditional Venetian red, which is noted for its brightness and warmth and for the fact that it produces salmon pinks of a warm cast. Indian red (sometimes forms of this are sold simply as red oxide) has a bluish tone and therefore produces cooler, rosy pinks. Bluish red oxides have historically been more widely available due to their being impure native pigments with a high oxide content (85 per cent). In the paint trade they are often referred to as Spanish red, and in John Smith's The Art of Painting, a guide to "vulgar painting" published in 1723, he refers to "Spanish Brown well ground and mix'd very thin with Linseed Oyl as a priming coat for woodwork." This practice reflects the time-honoured tradition of painters applying cheap paints as primers and undercoats.
CHANGING PIGMENT COLORS
Today, red ochre can be sourced as a native earth pigment, manufactured easily (for example, by roasting ferrous sulphate), or made directly from yellow ochre. This last is an experiment that may easily be tried out at home by calcination (roasting).
Take an old metal teaspoon half filled with yellow ochre pigment and heat it over a gas flame, or place the powder on a flat tin tray over a burner. Upon heating, the pigment will darken slowly, turning dark brown; once cooled it will lighten to a warm red, the equivalent of a good Venetian red. This process is irreversible and works by driving out water molecules from the pigment, converting hydrated oxides to anhydrous ones. Different temperatures will produce different colors, and the enterprising Mrs Merrifield, the venerated nineteenthcentury translator of Cennino Cennini's Il Libro Dell'Arte, describes how earth from Roche in Cornwall produced a wide range of colors, including violet. Today, the Mars colors, such as Mars violet, are chemically produced in methods little advanced from this process.
The process of calcination was known in ancient Rome; Theophrastus wrote about it in the fourth century BC, describing it as a method for manufacturing false cinnabar (a naturally occurring dark vermilion). Yet painters have always seemed to prefer the naturally available pigment to the artificial (and purer) version, perhaps because a red ochre calcined from yellow ochre is never as powerful as its naturally occurring namesake. The low price and wide availability of native red and yellow ochres has meant that they have entered the visual vocabulary of almost every civilization and can be found in decoration around the world, from Aboriginal songline paintings to African houses.
THE ESSENTIALS OF RED OCHRE
Commercially available as:
Red ochre, Persian red, Persian earth, Prussian red, red oxide, Mars red, Indian red, Venetian red; red oxide universal stain.
Contents
Iron oxide, clay. Mars colors are generally much purer.
Toxicity
No significant hazards.
Uses
* On tempera panels as flesh tones, mixed with white and yellow ochre.
* In fresco work and on the exterior of buildings, as for yellow ochre (see page 19).
* Red ochre is often applied beneath gold leaf or paint to warm the color of the leaf when applied. This can be enhanced by rubbing the leaf to expose the ground. In water gilding, a soft colored clay called bole is applied, mixed with a little gelatin glue, so that the leaf may be burnished once dry by polishing the bole through the leaf with a hard tool. The clay is really a cousin of the red ochre pigment, containing the same constituents but in differing proportions. Popular bole colors are red and yellow ochre, which are mixed to achieve an orange ochre.
Raw sienna
Raw sienna is often seen as a poor yellow in comparison to yellow ochre. But as a brown it possesses superb qualities; it is clean, light in color and wonderfully transparent and rich when brushed out. This latter property can be fully exploited when antiquing or glazing a surface. Moreover, it has found a firm place in every artist's palette due to its permanence and readiness to mix with other pigments as a toning or neutralizing color.
Like the ochres and umbers, the sienna colors are native earths, indicating that they are mined pigments that have undergone the minimum of processing or interference. However, whereas the ochres betray nothing of their origins, the names of the siennas and umbers indicate both their source and the processes behind them. The name sienna correctly suggests that raw and burnt sienna come, or at least came, from the area in Tuscany surrounding Siena. Not surprisingly, this region of Italy is veined with these colors; they are in the earth, the buildings, the riverbanks and the rocks. The same iron oxides in the pigment are found in the local clay that is used to make roof tiles and wall bricks in the city of Siena.
Raw sienna, like its brighter cousin yellow ochre, is simply dug out of the ground, washed and ground. When it is calcined (see page 20) it becomes burnt sienna. This process is identical to that which takes place when clay pots are fired; when cooked at a high temperature, terracotta clay changes color from gray to a reddish burnt tone.
Other parts of the world also are colored with this same pigment. In Britain, an area near Devizes in southern England has soil of exactly the color of raw sienna, and there exist several local examples of houses painted with limewash tinted with local clay. Often a spring or stream will have accumulated strongly pigmented pockets of clay that can be washed and used in paints, in the manner of the traditional local decorator. Around the world it is almost impossible to dissociate the colors of the landscape, the rocks, and soil from the traditional colors of buildings. Now that we prefer to use universally available colors in modern synthetic paints, we are in danger of losing the sense of geography that our buildings have traditionally had.
THE ESSENTIALS OF RAW SIENNA
Commercially available as:
Raw sienna, Italian ochre, Siena earth, Italian raw earth; raw sienna universal stain.
Contents
Clay, iron oxides, aluminium oxides.
Toxicity
No specific hazards.
Uses
* In flesh tones, and in glazing over other colors; raw sienna is particularly useful in glazes and historically in oil and tempera work.
* In fresco work and on the exterior of buildings, as for yellow ochre (see page 19).
* In antiquing solutions or as colorwashes to tone underlying colors and neutralize them. Raw sienna is often mixed with raw umber for these uses.
Burnt Sienna
Burnt sienna is deeper and richer than red ochre, but when washed out (see left) it shows some of the latter's brilliance and power. However, when mixed with white there is no mistaking this color; whereas red ochre produces delicate brown-pinks, burnt sienna, when mixed into white paint, makes pinky browns. These pastels are invaluable to fine artists in rendering flesh tones. In decoration, burnt sienna has been used as a brown that carries no trace of dirtiness. For this use alone it ought to be prized.
THE ESSENTIALS OF BURNT SIENNA
Commercially available as:
Burnt sienna, burnt Italian earth, burnt Italian ochre; burnt sienna universal stain.
Contents
Clay with iron oxides.
Toxicity
No significant hazards.
Uses
* In flesh tones, and in glazing over other colors; particularly useful in glazes and historically in oil and tempera work.
* In fresco work and on the exterior of buildings (see page 19).
Black
When is black not black? When it is a pigment. The strongest, deepest black available is carbon black, produced by collecting the sooty deposits from the flames of burning oils. Its antecedent, lamp black, dating from prehistoric times, wana, when mixed into white paint, makes pinky browns. These pastels are invaluable to fine artists in rendering flesh tones. In decoration, burnt sienna has been used as a brown that carries no trace of dirtiness. For this use alone it ought to be prized.
THE ESSENTIALS OF BURNT SIENNA
Commercially available as:
Burnt sienna, burnt Italian earth, burnt Italian ochre; burnt sienna universal stain.
Contents
Clay with iron oxides.
Toxicity
No significant hazards.
Uses
* In flesh tones, and in glazing over other colors; particularly useful in glazes and historically in oil and tempera work.
* In fresco work and on the exterior of buildings (see page 19).
Black
When is black not black? When it is a pigment. The strongest, deepest black available is carbon black, produced by collecting the sooty deposits from the flames of burning oils. Its antecedent, lamp black, dating from prehistoric times, was collected in chambers positioned above the flame and graded according to how greasy the deposits were. Because of the oil content of any type of carbon black, it is not recommended for mixing in oil as it will retard the drying. Its oiliness also renders it difficult to mix with water, which it will instantly repel.
Other ancient pigments are ivory black or bone black, which are jet black with a useful brownish undertone. They both mix with oil or water, making them useful pigments to keep in powder form.
THE ESSENTIALS OF CARBON BLACK
Commercially available as:
Carbon black, lamp black, ivory black, bone black, drop black; black universal stain.
Contents
Pure carbon with varying quantities of oily and tarry deposits.
Toxicity
Skin, inhalation, ingestion all moderate, but carbon is a known carcinogen and repeated contact may lead to skin cancer.
Uses
* Toning and darkening of other pigments, cement and plaster.
* Tinting white paints to delicate off-whites.
* Creating interesting pale blue tints when mixed into white paints such as casein wall paint, synthetic acrylic latexs or distemper; bone black should produce brown-grays, useful for stonework.
Burnt umber
Burnt umber, a calcined version of raw umber (see pages 30-1), is perhaps the least used of the native earth pigments. This is partly because of its deep, unremitting brown and partly because the umber pigments are highly absorbent of any oil. This means that any oil paint for house painting that is manufactured to contain burnt umber will necessarily contain a great deal of oil medium relative to the liquidity of the paint. The result is a highly tough and leathery oil film on the paint when dry that is acceptable in a top coat but useless in an undercoat because such flexibility will lead further coats of paint to crack. For this reason, the pigment has never been used as a cheap undercoating color in the way that red ochre has.
However, burnt umber has found much historical use as a top coat. Earth colors that are truly native to any one country have always, until widespread manufacture of cheap synthetic pigments, provided the cheapest colorant. As a result, they are the colors most widely found in and on old vernacular buildings.
The swatch to the right of this page indicates the kind of tones produced when burnt umber is mixed into white paint (from the center of the swatch towards the bottom of the page). However, when not mixed into white, burnt umber displays rich, warm undertones and these can be best viewed when the pigment is washed out, as on the right (from the center of the swatch towards the top of the page). This appealing earthy quality, combined with the fair translucency of the pigment, is best appreciated when the color is laid onto a warmer colored ground such as a parchment or straw color. These are common grounds for woodgraining, so it is not unusual to find burnt umber being employed by decorative artists to assist in faking some of the denser woodgrains such as mahogany and dark walnut. Indeed, in common with burnt sienna (another quite transparent pigment), burnt umber seems to have been used in graining for at least 300 years.
Fine artists have also appreciated the transparent richness of burnt umber for several centuries. Holbein preferred to sketch out his paintings in brown monochrome, often apparently building up quite detailed modeling using black and umber. Likewise, this practice of using washes of brown for underpainting was employed by Italian artists of the same period.
THE ESSENTIALS OF BURNT UMBER
Commercially available as:
Burnt umber; burnt umber universal stain.
Contents
Iron oxides, clay, manganese dioxide. Manganese salts have a catalytic drying effect upon oil paint and so any umber color will shorten drying times.
Toxicity
Manganese, if ingested or inhaled at chronic levels, induces manganese poisoning. On a normal day-to-day level of contact, most decorators are unlikely to build up sufficient reserves of the metal in their bodies. However, observe the usual precautions when handling the pigment in powder and liquid form.
Uses
* For glazing and shading flesh tones in portraiture.
* In fresco work and on the exterior of buildings, as in yellow ochre (see page 19).
* Burnt umber may also be mixed with raw umber to produce plain neutral browns for antiquing, rubbing into craquelure, and coloring in imitation of leather.
* In woodgraining, where it should be used in varnish or a glaze as either a tinting or graining coat.
* As an alternative to burnt umber use Vandyke brown (see raw umber, pages 30-1).
Terra verde
The basic palette of earth colors is conventionally seen as an arrangement of six colors, separated by name and characteristics into three pairs. Yellow ochre may be heated to red ochre, which is also naturally abundant, raw sienna may be heated to produce burnt sienna, both deeper and browner versions of the ochres. And raw umber, when roasted, will yield burnt umber.
To this list I have also added black in this section, since it is the oldest pigment of all (see page 25), and finally a marginal outsider, but a valuable addition, terra verde, or green earth. (Roasting this pigment turns it brown.) Terra verde, as its name suggests, is an earth pigment native to Italy and it contains clay, iron oxides, like all earth colors, and some manganese (responsible, as in the case of raw umber, for some of the greening). Its peculiarity is that these are present in very small quantities, rendering the pigment extremely transparent and useless as a body color, but therefore excellent as a glazing color. The latter advantage is further enhanced by its slight bluish-gray tinge, redolent of verdigris. When mixed into wax, this makes terra verde a very useful glazing color for bronze, whether real or fake.
The finest grades of terra verde come from Verona or Bohemia, but other sources include Cyprus and the Mendip hills in the west of England, where I live. I have found small quantities of local green clay and levigated them (see page 19) to produce an acceptable, if slightly dull, pigment. When I do this, I know I am repeating the same process that thousands of decorators and colorists have used before me. Terra verde may not have the same Egyptian and Minoan pedigree of its sister earth colors, but it was certainly used extensively by the Romans, who valued its permanence in fresco wall paintings.
USING TERRA VERDE FOR ICONS
Around the end of the first millennium, the artists of the Greek church were perfecting the painting styles of religious icons, strictly formalized works that conformed to precise design and color principles, and for which terra verde was an essential component. By the twelfth century, these artists were in employment abroad, teaching wall and easel painters in Italy the principles of their art and laying the seeds of the Italian Renaissance. Tempera panels, painted on gilded gesso grounds with figures of the seated Madonna and child, are typical of early Italian work and employ the technique of painting the flesh, first with a solid coat of terra verde, and then detailing it in verdaccio, a neutral green-gray of several shades and tints for painting in shadows and highlights. Thus a whole face was painted in green with all the features delineated and shaded. This served as the underpainting to give the later layers of flesh colors realism. Tempera paint consists of pigment suspended usually in egg yolk and so is somewhat glutinous and translucent when applied; this technique is difficult and relies on building successive layers of semiopaque colors, resulting in an effect of great depth and life.
Cennini describes the final stage of painting flesh: "You must prepare three gradations of flesh color, each one lighter than the other, laying every tint in its right place, taking care not to cover over the whole of the verdaccio, but shading...and softening off in the tenderest manner. On a panel more coats of color are required than on a wall, and yet not so many but that the green tint under the flesh color should be just visible through it."
OTHER USES OF TERRA VERDE
The use of terra verde is by no means restricted to the artist's palette. It is a cheap green that house painters have tried wherever possible to employ, usually mixed with a little white to give it body and opacity. In 1692, at Burghley House in Northamptonshire, the decorative gilder assisting the painter Verrio bought 1 lb of "Italian Green Earth", sufficient, in fact, to paint the woodwork in a room or to serve as a color under or against gilding. Today, terra verde is a little used pigment but it does deserve experimenting with, since once applied it is, unlike so many other green pigments, both lightfast and permanent.
THE ESSENTIALS OF TERRA VERDE
Commercially available as:
Terra verde, green earth, terre verte, verdetta, celadon green, Verona green (turning to Verona brown when roasted); green oxide universal stain.
Contents
Iron oxides and small quantities of manganese.
Toxicity
No known hazards, although care should be taken when handling in powder form. Repeated and daily ingestion or inhalation could lead to manganese poisoning. For symptoms, see burnt umber on pages 26-7 and raw umber on pages 30-1.
Uses
* In fresco work, since the pigment will not be affected or changed by chemical attack, including the action of alkaline salts present in damp lime plaster.
* In oil glazes and varnishes as a decorative film over trompe l'oeil landscape painting.
* In tempera, oil and acrylic painting beneath flesh tones.
* In the artificial patination of bronze when mixed with wax and in faking verdigris.
Raw umber
Although raw umber can hardly be described as an exciting color, its place in the decorator's palette is paramount because it is such a good and universal toning color. Unlike its burnt equivalent (see pages 26-7), raw umber has no hint of hot brown; rather, it tends towards the green or yellow and so is distinctly cool in appearance.
Italy produces fine umbers derived, as the name suggests, originally from Umbria, the region south of Tuscany where Siena is situated. Chemically, umber is identical to all the ochres and siennas, differing only in that it contains much more manganese, rendering the pigment useful as a drying agent in oil. It is widely recognized that Cyprus produces the best grades, known as Turkey umber, and this name crops up repeatedly in historical references to paint color.
The uses of raw umber are legion. For the artist it proves a useful alternative to black in painting shadows, and for the decorator it is an excellent dirt color, for use in varnish or wax as an antiquing color. It can also serve as a neutral brown wash to suggest dried earthy plaster, and is perhaps best employed in the company of other washes laid above it, such as burnt sienna. A particularly fine parchment or skin color is achieved by overlayering colorwashes of raw umber, burnt sienna and raw sienna (see colorwashing on pages 70-5 for a version of this employing raw sienna and raw umber).
Raw umber also serves a more subtle use as a greying toner when mixed with other colors. The effect of mixing it with a deep, solid color such as yellow ochre or pea green is to antique it immediately and render the dried paint with a subtle complexity that synthetic paint colorants cannot match. To explore this, experiment by adding raw umber to a variety of colors.
RAW UMBER AS TONER
A secondary, and almost more important, use of raw umber is as a toning pigment in pale colors and white paint. As the swatch to the right illustrates, when mixed with white paint (from the middle to the bottom of the page), raw umber loses all its greenness and independent identity, producing instead a warm grey that virtually no black can. This brown-grey color is invaluable as a gentle toner, mainly as a way of eliminating searing white paints from interiors and pulling decorative schemes together. The problem with white paint is that, other than snow, there is nothing in the natural or built environment colored pure white. Given this single connotation of pure white, it is hardly surprising that we perceive it as a symbol of purity but also as a sterile color that sits uneasily against other colors. Even among modernist designers and architects, pure white has now been replaced with "natural" whites, those of chalk and stone and skies.
Historically, too, the traditional color of white-painted woodwork was, until the latter half of the twentieth century, much more subtle and quieter than that of brilliant white gloss, which is quite unsuitable for historic interiors. Appropriate and traditional oil paints formulated with lead carbonate or lead sulphate produced creamy-grey whites. These colors may be successfully imitated by using raw umber added to bought white paint, with the optional addition of a drop of raw sienna, burnt umber, or black. Experiments with different combinations will yield slightly different off-whites to suit various decorative schemes. However, I have found that raw umber alone gives a very pleasing warm grey-white that seems perfectly at home in most color schemes, especially those containing warm colors such as yellow ochre.
Raw umber may also be introduced to white water-based paints, such as traditional distemper, for painting ceilings. In rooms where the decoration is strong or dark, you will be surprised at how dark a ceiling color may be tinted and still appear as white to the eye when the room is finished. In this way, you will succeed in integrating a color scheme in which there appears to be strong contrasts. The trick is not to then introduce anything that is pure white.
In both these roles, of toner for strongly-colored paints and of greying toner for pale or white paints, raw umber is much superior to black, which tends to introduce a hard edge to the dried color.
VANDYKE BROWN AND VANDYKE CRYSTALS
Although not a pure earth color, nor an ancient one, some mention should be made of this pigment as a useful replacement for the umbers, particularly burnt umber, the color which it most closely resembles.
Vandyke is a native earth pigment that contains vegetable humus and bitumen as well as iron oxides. The poor grades are fugitive and when applied thickly as paint will eventually crack and wrinkle. However, when mixed thinly into varnish, glaze or shellac, this highly transparent pigment gives a warm luminous coating, especially effective on Dutch metal leaf or gold paint. Provided it is of a good quality, Vandyke brown will not fade. It is also very useful in graining and marbling, where its transparency adds to the effect of depth.
Vandyke crystals, soluble in hot water, are sold as a cheap woodstain. However, as it contains bitumen, the liquid can also be used as a graining solution since it requires no further binder to be added. According to the strength of the solution, a wide variety of colors can be procured from the crystals, from near-black to pale amber, making them versatile and essential for effective woodgraining. This is especially so over brighter grounds, emulating the richer woods such as rosewood, walnut, and mahogany (see pages 230-5).
THE ESSENTIALS OF RAW UMBER
Commercially available as:
Raw umber, Roman umber, Sicilian umber, Cyprian umber, Cyprus earth, Turkey umber; raw umber universal stainer.
Contents
Iron oxides, clay, manganese dioxide. Manganese salts have a drying effect upon oil paint and so any umber color will shorten drying times.
Toxicity
Manganese, if ingested or inhaled at chronic levels, induces manganese poisoning, an illness resembling Parkinson's disease. On a normal day-to-day level of contact, most decorators are unlikely to build up sufficient reserves of the metal in their bodies. However, you should observe the usual precautions when handling the pigment in powder and liquid form.
Uses
* For toning white or pastel paints.
* For toning and muting colored paints.
* In fresco work and on the exterior of buildings, as for yellow ochre (see page 19).
* In woodgraining, where it should be used in varnish or a glaze as a tinting or graining coat.
* For antiquing, when mixed with glazes or waxes.
White
It is impossible to write about colors and not talk about white. Although many see it as a non-color, like black (see page 25), white is often only white by degrees, and each variety of it handles in a different way. So some of the various subtle forms of white deserve a mention.
CHALK
The most common and ancient of coloring materials, and also a cheap pigment, chalk has been powdered into simple wall paints such as casein and distemper for thousands of years. It also forms the basis of pastels and gouache paint. It is harmless and inert, dries quite opaque in water paints but becomes transparent in oil or wax. Chalk is particularly notable for its creamy umber off-white color and the delicacy with which it renders the finish of all paints that contain it.
WHITE LEAD
Now banned from use on all but the most important historic houses because of health risks, lead carbonate is a quite pure white that was traditionally manufactured using lead sheets, spent tan, and vinegar. It is not used in water paints owing to its toxicity and its tendency to blacken on exposure to hydrogen sulphide when mixed with poor water-based binders. However, white lead blends superbly with oil and the combination of the two is universally recognized as the most beautiful paint to handle under the brush. This is due to its ability to form a chemically intimate mixture with the fatty acids present in oil to make a tough, smooth, and elastic paint. Lead paints will usually wear, not by cracking or peeling away like modern synthetic coatings, but by chalking and wearing thin.
A slightly less toxic, and less brilliant, form of lead paint has traditionally been formulated using lead sulphate.
LIME
A full description of this white is given under the limewash technique on pages 96-9. It is not commonly used as a pigment but as a coating and has a lightening effect on pigments mixed with it.
TITANIUM WHITE
In industry, titanium has become the most widely used white pigment, replacing many of its inferior antecedents such as lithopone. This is due to its inertness, exceptional covering power, stability, brilliant whiteness, and non-toxicity. Despite a tendency to chalk in oil, it is the most reliable synthetic white.
LESS COMMONLY USED WHITES
Zinc white: bright white but translucent.
Lithopone: zinc sulphide and barium sulphate mixed together; used in cheap paints.
Blanc fixe and barytes: variations of barium and zinc whites.
Ultramarine Blue
Ultramarine, which was once made by crushing the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, originally came from a few mines in Afghanistan. Only certain grades of lapis are suitable and even they only yield a tiny proportion of the color in relation to the amount of stone crushed. The name ultramarine literally signifies "from across the sea", indicating that to reach Europe the material had to be shipped in. The cost of mining and of transportation together escalated the cost of ultramarine so that, historically, the finest grades cost more than their weight in gold.
Blue pigments have always been hard to find in nature, particularly those which are lightfast and resistant to alkalis and acids. Pliny d