Yellow oil paints

Cadmium yellow oil paint

(Cadmium, naples & oxide types)

Cadmium Yellow Deep is a deep orange yellow that is intensely saturated and lightfast. This opaque yellow has a strong tinting intensity and a mild drying time.

Using Cadmium Reds and Yellows in Oil Painting: 2 Keys to Success

Using cadmium reds and cadmium yellows in oil painting can be tricky.

Have you ever been painting with either Cadmium Red or Cadmium Yellow and gotten frustrated because you couldn’t get the color mix right?

When it comes to mixing colors with cadmium, it can be a little tricky.

Understanding the Cadmium Pigments

There are normally two or three phases or stages in the cadmium family of colours.

Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Medium, and Cadmium Yellow Deep are the most common yellow cadmiums (or sometimes Dark).

Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Red Medium, and Cadmium Red Deep are the most common names for the red cadmium family (or sometimes Dark).

These names can differ depending on the artist oil paint manufacturer, so keep that in mind. You’ll want to make sure you have the correct version of these primary colours.

#1.Just purchase Cadmium Yellow Light and Cadmium Red Light.

With these highly costly pigments, buying only cadmium red light and cadmium yellow light can save you money.

Only Cadmium Yellow Light and Cadmium Red Light can be bought. These two colours are the most adaptable and straightforward to work with.

Buying only these two colours with these very costly pigments can save you money, and here’s why:

You can easily go from cadmium yellow light to cadmium yellow medium or cadmium yellow deep (dark) just by adding a little red and maybe graying just a little.

Following the same idea, you can easily go from cadmium red light to cadmium red medium or cadmium red deep (dark) just by adding a little blue and maybe graying a little.

So it’s easy to create the other 2 from the single light color.  But you can’t go back in the other direction.

In other words, you can’t make Cadmium Yellow Light from Cadmium Yellow medium or Deep.  And, of course, the same thing is true of Cadmium Red Medium or Deep.

Naples yellow oil paint

In mixing flesh tones, Yellow Ocher (ochre) and Naples Yellow are essential . Many artists begin by mixing 1 part of Alizarin Crimson with 5 parts of either Yellow Ocher or Naples Yellow. To this, oil painters mix in lead white. If you need to darken the mixture, you can add either raw sienna or burnt sienna with a little Ultramarine Blue. Skin coloration varies greatly. To get the flesh tone that you desire will require testing.   The resulting color is your base fleshtone.

Yellow Ocher

Yellow Ocher (also spelled ochre) is one of the most common pigments used on any artist’s palette. Basically, ocher pigments are comprised of silica or silicon dioxide (SiO2) and clay – in short, sand and dirt. The iron minerals (iron oxyhydroxide or FeO(OH)) in the clay, which is finely ground rock, give these pigments their color.

Used since cavemen painted on their walls as well as in the tombs of the pharaohs, ocher describes a broad range of colors, which can vary in hues from yellow to orange to purple and to brown. Among those natural pigment paints described as Yellow Ocher or Golden Ocher (PY43 or Pigment Yellow 43), colors range from pale yellow to a golden yellow. Although many of the modern Yellow Ocher paints are made using synthetic pigments, some paint manufacturers, such as the Natural Pigments, LLC, based in California, still use natural earth pigments.

What makes Yellow Ocher so important to portrait painters is that its appearance, when mixed with lead white, closely matches the color of a wide range of fleshtones from paler Caucasian skin colors to the darker fleshtones of other races. Keep in mind that Yellow Ocher made with natural clay can vary in appearance, depending on where the clay was mined.  Yellow Ocher can also differ in their degree of transparency.

In addition to appearance, the composition of ocher oil paint can vary from one manufacturer to another. While the oil paints used by the Old Masters primarily consisted of pigments and oil, modern paint formulations include fillers and other additives. Because of differences in manufacturing, the same color from different manufacturers can differ in texture, hue, opacity and permanence.

Naples Yellow

Naples Yellow (PY 41) consists of the chemical compound, lead antimonite – Pb(SbO3)2 or Pb(SbO4)2.  This reddish yellow synthetic pigment has been used for thousands of years as far back as the ancient Egyptians and the Babylonians. Naples Yellow is manufactured by gradually heating lead and antimony, a silvery metal, to a high temperature. This process is called calcination.

The Naples Yellow pigment is opaque, lightfast and chemically stable. However, when any lead based pigment is exposed to polluted air containing hydrogen sulfide, it can darken.  As a powdered pigment, Naples Yellow should be handled with care because lead compounds are very toxic. In fact, all powdered pigments should be handled with care.

The hue of Naples Yellow can range from bright yellow to a reddish yellow. Naples Yellow Black, which has a similar appearance to Yellow Ocher, was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. Naples Yellow Dark is useful for mixing fleshtones when blended with lead white.

With the advent of metallic yellows such as Chrome Yellow and Cadmium Yellow in the 19th century, this dye fell out of favour.

Yellow oxide oil paint

This is a hue that has a lot of wow factor, but its sources are lost in the mists of time. Yellow Oxide has been a basic natural clay mined from the earth for tens of thousands of years or more. Improvements were made. It may have been some yellowish damp clay found in some nearby river at first. Picking out twigs and other larger debris from the natural clay and potentially pounding it between stones to break it up into a manageable consistency is probably all that was needed for many uses.

There was a need for a reliable supply of the yellowest available oxides in massive amounts by the time the ancient Egyptians were constructing pyramids, and production was focused on a few special locations with large teams of staff engaged in extraction, refining, grinding, and transportation on an industrial scale. The pigment itself, on the other hand, was essentially unchanged from millennia-old oxides.

By the late nineteenth century, the growing plastics and house paint industries required the amounts of higher-quality oxides, as many typical natural supplies were being exhausted. Patents for the synthetic iron oxide process, which is still used today, were issued in 1921, and this issue was solved.

Since Mars was the god of iron, and the planet Mars was red, like some of the first oxides, these synthetic colours were dubbed Mars colours. This synthetics were critical for a number of purposes. Since natural ochres are clays, the real colour component was as low as 20%, with the remainder being pollutants. As a consequence, natural ochre is often a bit darker than synthetic Yellow Oxide. Yellow Oxide, in addition to having a more pure appearance, has the potential to resist UV light, so its use in plastics and coatings strengthens the polymers, increasing the life of products used outdoors.

The higher proportion of iron oxide in synthetic Yellow Oxide was thus crucial for a range of industrial applications requiring UV resistance, including the rapidly increasing house paint industry. Electronics is another area where iron oxide pigments are in high demand because they are used to produce the magnetic data storage disks in hard drives. One of the key reasons that synthetic ochre has almost entirely replaced natural ochre in manufacturing and the visual arts is the desire for purity. The synthetic oxide has increasingly replaced natural ochres in artist paint, with colour purity being the driving force behind the change.

The automobile industry’s need for exciting new colours for automobiles led to the marketing of translucent versions of iron oxides in the late twentieth century, which have now made their way into artist paints. Since the pigment particles expand slowly and get bigger before they meet the appropriate scale, translucent representations of the colours have been possible since 1921. The pigment in regular Yellow Oxide is invisible, but any paint produced from it in the early stages of manufacturing will be translucent since the particles are still small. At the beginning, this was deemed a defect, because only the greater particle size, and hence opaque Yellow Oxide, was sold.

The chemists and businesspeople who made those decisions certainly had no idea that artists would have adored the clear oxides, and because artists aren’t normally chemists, they were definitely ignorant of the transparency choices and therefore didn’t order them. We are lucky in that the car industry inevitably generated the market, and musicians became unwittingly the winners.

On the palette, Transparent Yellow Oxide is used in the same manner as Yellow Oxide, with the apparent exception of clarity. There will be some functional variations in use as a result of this. It’s definitely best to use the opaque Yellow Oxide for rendering skin tones in an oil paint-like technique, but the Transparent Yellow Oxide should be your first preference if you’re working in a watercolor-like technique. Transparent Yellow Oxide is a better substitute for all other applications, such as blending greens.

The openness allows for the creation of glowing undertones, which can be both creatively and visually appealing. This is particularly useful when using other translucent pigments. Darkish greens with a lovely lighter green glow in thin passages when mixed with Phthalo Blue or Phthalo Green. When combined with Aureolin Yellow, the result is a leathery Raw Sienna-like mass tone with a lovely light gold undertone.

Colors with the warm glow of a furnace or lava streaming from a volcano can be used for sunsets or fleshy pink ochres in skin as Translucent Yellow Oxide is combined with Primary Red or some other transparent red. When combined with Permanent Light Violet, it creates very delicate weathered and bleached wood shades, or when combined with Aqua Green Light, it creates lovely eucalyptus leaf colours. This colour can be used to create a plethora of stunning colour combinations.