Monday, April 30, 2012

Same Name - Different Color


When purchasing paint it is good to know that the same color manufactured by different companies are very often quite different. Below are two examples of Ultramarine blue. The Luiquitex and Windsor Newton are no where near the same even though they are both listed on the labels as Ultramarine. When mixing these two brands with a yellow to make green the results are startling different.

To confuse matters even more, some brands of Ultramarine blue are listed as reddish ultramarine, greenish ultramarine and so on. It's too bad there isn't some sort of standard but there isn't.

While teaching a workshop, I was using Liquitex Indian Yellow which is a transparent. A student had a tube of Indian Yellow from Cheap Joes and that brand was completely opaque and will of course give a totally different result.

Just beware of what you are buying and what the paint manufacturers are selling. It can get confusing.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks..this helps to know this before buying paints. Do you have many more samples like this? The picture of the two as a dark and light value tells it all!!

Windmill Artist said...

Interesting. I recently read that a German company has bought both Winsor& Newton and Liquitex, two art suppliers with distinctly different national identities. Seems as though the new investor has left formulations to their roots.