Pigment Palaver: Five Types of Black

There's a bit of received wisdom in the painting world that boils down to: “Don't use black paint.” The idea behind it is that black is essentially the lazy painter's shortcut. Instead of using a black pigment, so the advice goes, a painter should mix something very close to black from a mix of a few colors, since if you're painting from life very little of what we see is actually pure black, but rather just a very dark shade of a color (say, for instance, a dark shadow; mostly it's a very dark shade of whatever color the shadow is projected on).

Of course, I encountered this particular piece of received wisdom specifically in the form of advice saying to ignore it. While there's certainly value in trying to mix up your own blacks, you should also feel free to use the full range of pigments available. (I think it may also have originally applied to oil painting, with the point of the advice being that what might not have worked for oils may very well work for acrylics.) And, while artists may not encounter black much in the typical daytime landscape or still life, one place we do regularly encounter it is in the night sky. And since my very first painting was of a nighttime landscape, I picked up some black to paint the background.

In doing so, I discovered that the store sold not one, not two, but three different types of black. I picked one called Mars black essentially at random, on the basis that Mars was associated with iron, and iron oxide caused the colors of both Mars and Maunakea, but my interest was piqued. (Incidentally, Mars black is so-called precisely because of that association with iron, as its color comes from synthetic iron oxide particles.)

Perhaps half a year later, around January of this year, I came across a Kickstarter for what was being billed as the “mattest, blackest paint available to artist.” (Matte is just the opposite of glossy; a glossy black would still reflect a lot of light at certain angles, while a matte black would look much flatter and black from the same angle.) There's a bit of a backstory for this Kickstarter, going back to the invention of Vantablack in around 2014, a specially-grown film of carbon nanotubes that creates a black color that absorbs up to 99.96% of visible light incident on it. (For comparison, a typical black paint may only absorb ~95–97% of visible light.)

This was pretty cool, but then the company who created Vantablack licensed its use in art to a single person. This got some artists pretty upset, considering all the cool possibilities for something that black. One of them, a U.K. artist by the name of Stuart Semple, who'd been making his own pigments and art supplies for years as a side business, decided to make his own black paint that would be available for all artists. (I've mentioned his company, Culture Hustle, before, because that's where I got my glow-in-the-dark “Lit” paint.)

Anyway, Semple came up with a really nice, flat, matte, black paint called simply “Black,” then a few months later came up with an improved version called “Black 2.0.” These sold pretty well apparently, so he went back to the drawing board to come up with an even matter, flatter, blacker version (called, imaginatively enough, “Black 3.0”). This is where the Kickstarter comes in, as it was intended to fund an initial production run. I got interested enough to back it, and ended up with two bottles of Black 3.0 and a bottle of Black 2.0 as a bonus. (Interestingly, from what I can tell this Kickstarter is currently sitting at the ninth-highest funded campaign in the “Art” category.)

Oh, and somewhere along the line I picked up the two remaining black paints from the art store (ivory black and carbon black), so if you're keeping count I now have five different varieties of black paint. Last week I finally got around to comparing them with each other, by painting each of five 4×4 inch canvas panels a different black. Below are two pictures taken from different angles, showing all five pigments with the associated bottle or tube of paint.

From left to right: carbon black, ivory black, Mars black, Black 2.0, and Black 3.0.

Now, the pictures unfortunately don't really do justice to these different paints, but there are some subtle and not-so-subtle difference between them in person. For instance, carbon black, on the far left, is actually pretty glossy and shiny, certainly more so than any of the rest. (Carbon black is made of amorphous carbon—originally soot though it's manufactured now—and is probably one of the earliest pigments humans ever used.) On the far right, Black 3.0 is indeed the darkest, flattest, blackest (and newest!) of the blacks, and the rest fall in slightly different places between the two extremes. (Another interesting difference between them is how they feel: they tend to get rougher from left to right, to the point where I physically dislike the feel past about Mars black in the middle.)

Incidentally, if you're wondering what color black I used for the background of my various space pictures so far, I'm not sure. That's because I used Matisse Black Gesso to prepare the background, which doesn't say what the black pigment (or pigments) used was. I think it might be either Mars black or ivory black based on the general level of glossiness and look, but I haven't directly compared it to my fancy new paint swathes yet. (Edit: having done so, I think it looks closest to ivory black, though it's not a perfect match; this might be because gesso isn't just paint but also includes things to make it provide a good painting background, so even with the same pigment it might come out looking slightly different.)

Anyway, welcome to the exciting wide world of black acrylic paint. I have an idea for that Black 3.0 which I'm excited to get to started on soon (hopefully I finish up my current large project this week so I can get to work on it), and I'll see what uses I can put the rest to in the future. Maybe some painting of black lava rock from Hawaii? We'll see! A hui hou!

Painting Nudibranchs: Blue Glaucus

I took this past week off to rest and recuperate after the one-two combo of preparing for my Mid-Candidature Review and coming down with the flu in the middle of doing so, and I finally got around to painting again (which I hadn't done for about three weeks due to all that). I also started a new painting yesterday for the first time in a few months now, and then painted for four straight hours today to finish it as I just couldn't put it down once I'd started. I took a few pictures along the way, so you can see how it progressed.

When I first started painting last year, I only had plans for doing primarily inanimate targets: landscapes, astronomical vistas, things of that sort. I didn't feel very qualified to try painting something animal and alive. After painting a few small animals in various paintings which came out quite charmingly, however, about two months ago I began to want to try my hand at a larger animal painting. During this time I accidentally inspired myself as to my choice of target for my first foray into this new artistic territory when I was showing pictures to a friend of my favorite neustonic aeolid nudibranch: the blue glaucus, Glaucus atlanticus (also sometimes known as a sea swallow, or blue dragon). If you don't know what some of those words in the previous sentence mean, I'll explain as I go through the painting process.

I wanted a nice, sandy-looking background for this painting, so I started by making what looks like a piece of modern art. I decided to mix directly on the canvas, so I put some colors (skin tone base, titanium white, primary yellow, and Australian ghost gum [off-white]), gel containing natural sand, and some glazing medium to lower the overall viscosity of the mixture. I then mixed all this together with my painting knife, then smoothed it out (and covered the sides of the canvas) with a brush. I might talk about this in another post, but the joy of tactile manipulation of gels and mediums around the canvas is one of the big draws of painting for me.

Getting back to the painting subject, the blue glaucus is a nudibranch, or as they're more popularly known, a sea slug. Nudibranch means “naked gill,” as these slugs have external gills on their bodies. They're often brilliantly colored, and can be extraordinarily beautiful.

Nudibranchs come in two main divisions, the dorids, which look more-or-less like land slugs with a single feathery plume of gills on their back, and the aeolids, which have lots of soft horn-shaped cerata on their backs or sides. These cerata function as gills, but also as defense systems, as many aeolids feeds on cnidarians like jellyfish and sea anemones. The sea slug eats the stinging cells (or cnidocytes) from their cnidarian  prey without setting them off, and transfers them to specially-prepared pouches (called cnidosacs) in the tips of its cerata where it can use them to defend itself from predators. (This process of stealing cnidocytes is called, logically enough, “kleptocnidy,” a word which I can only guess the correct pronunciation of as I couldn't find it in a dictionary.)

Here's the finished sandy background, and here's where I tried something new: instead of free-hand painting, I sketched a blue glaucus out beforehand so I could correct the reference and get it right before putting paint down. The blue glaucus is unusual for a nudibranch, in that, unlike nearly all of its brethren, which live sensible benthic lives on the ocean floor, it spends its life floating on the surface of the ocean eating jellyfish. The correct term for this behavior, I learned today, is “neustonic” (and not pelagic as I previously thought, which properly means free-swimming creatures).

Here's a shot partway through the panting process, where I'd filled in all the lighter silver and silvery-blue parts. Interestingly, the blue glaucus floats upside-down on its back, so what we see from the top is actually is stomach (and foot, since it's a slug, though it doesn't really use it like other slugs do). It displays reverse countershading coloration, whereby it looks darker on top to be harder to see from above against the ocean, and lighter on the bottom to be harder to see from below. (In fact, its back is a nearly solid silver color.) From this position, floating on its back in the ocean, it lives off of jellyfish-like creatures (among them the Portuguese man o' war, the by-the-wind sailor, and the blue button) and even similarly-neustonic violet sea snails.

“Carefree Blue Dragon (Glaucus atlanticus)”, 30×40 cm, acrylic on canvas.

Anyway, here's the finished painting! Here you can see the blue glaucus in all its glory. While most aeolid nudibranchs have their cerata on their backs, the blue glaucus instead has them in bunches along its sides.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but I'll probably touch this painting up a bit. I wanted to give the impression of viewing a blue glaucus floating in shallow water above a sandy bed, so I may add some minor features to the background (pebbles, small shells, maybe a shadow from the slug, etc.). Also, I think I made the cerata on the first pair of ‘wings’ a bit too short. Based on the pictures I looked at it seems like the span of that first pair of cerata is about as wide as the slug is long, but that seemed too extreme while I was sketching it so I shortened it a little. It looked fine in the drawing stage, but I'm now thinking I might need to go back and extend them out a bit longer. Luckily that shouldn't be too difficult (other than trying to match the colors I used before).

Other than that minor quibble, I'm quite happy with the coloration and general proportions (though looking at it now, the tail might be slightly too long as well). I spent a lot of time looking at pictures and drawing some sketches to try to get an idea of how the proportions worked (such as how the tips of the cerata in a ‘wing’ tend to extend out to the edges of an imaginary ellipse) and I think it shows through in the painting. Oh, I forgot to mention that these things are actually pretty small, only about an inch or two in length, so this is several times larger than life size!

It's definitely been fun to try painting something living, and I'll probably try it again in the future once I get some more inspiration. It also feels good to get back to painting after a forced absence from it. A hui hou!

Edit (29/09/2019): Well, in my usual fashion of picking up paintings again after I originally thought them finished, I've gone back and made some changes to this one. It turns out I made the first pair of cerata too short, so I lengthened them up a bit, though I liked the first version better aesthetically. (The lengths looked fine when I was sketching, but comparing the finished painting to photos I realized they definitely needed to be longer.) I also added a floating shadow, to give the illusion of looking down at a sea slug floating in a shallow pool. If I'd been thinking I'd have sketched in the shadow in the design phase and painted it first, but… Anyway, I think I'm happy with this version.