CH 5 Paint and Pigments

I loved reading about pigments.  James Gurney taught us how colors received their name, where they came from, and how they came to be.   Did you know purple was considered royalty because it came from a mollusk which 12,000 would only produce 1.4 grams of. 

Pigment- dry powdery material that absorbs wavelengths of light in order to create color.

Binders- material that binds or holds a pigment together.

Each pigment has the attributes: hue, value, and chroma.  Organic pigments contain carbon and inorganic do not.  Inorganic tent to be more opaque while Organic pigments are more brilliant.

In this chapter we learned about lightfastness.  This is how fast a color fades.  James Gurney experimented with all sorts of mediums over the course of eight months and found out that the blues tended to fad the most. With the dyes, the purple completely disappeared.   He gave the following safe guards: buy paint with a 1 or 2 ASTM rating, keep your art in dark places, use UV-filtered glass, and don’t hang it in direct sunlight.

He also mentioned key with warm underpainting.  One of the main reasons is because it will make blues and greens, “sparkle by complementary contrast.” Furthermore, the key to painting landscape with sky is DO THE SKY prior to painting.  He mentioned having studies done with just sky colors so you know what to mix, have premixed mixtures on hand, or paint the sky before hand so trees or other dark objects don’t blur in the wet light sky paint.

To organize your palette, put the warms by the thumbhole, with white first, and graduate down to the cools/darks.