Pigment Palaver: YInMn Blue

Way back in the first post in this series, I mentioned I was inspired to start it by the discovery of YInMn Blue, or Oregon Blue. It actually wasn't commercially available yet back in 2019, but it's finally been cleared for consumer use and went on sale just recently. This site is selling it as part of the Matisse line of acrylics by Australian company Derivan, which incidentally is the brand I've gotten most of my paint from. (Though Derivan's own website, oddly, isn't listing it yet.) YInMn Blue is notable as the first new inorganic blue pigment discovered in quite some time (I've seen conflicting reports on what the most recent previous inorganic blue pigment—Prussian Blue or Manganese Blue—is, but it seems like it's been at least a hundred years since the last one was discovered.)

You might notice, if you followed the link, that this is a very expensive paint. It's currently going for $179.40 for a 40 ml tube, or $4.49/ml. Given that the company is located in Maine, I'm assuming that's in US dollars, so at the time of writing that'd be $5.87/ml AUD. Normally the Matisse Structure Formula line comes in 75 ml tubes in seven tiers of pricing ranging from $10.75 to $38.95, so that's $0.14 to $0.52 per milliliter. Yes, this paint is more than ten times more expensive than standard paint pricing.

To understand why, we have to turn to the name. The name YInMn Blue comes from the chemical formula of the pigment in this paint: yttrium-indium-manganese oxide. (It's also called Oregon Blue, since it was discovered at Oregon State University in 2009.) From what I've read, indium is the main factor in the cost, being a rather rare element (comparable to silver), though the production of the pigment might also be a factor, as it requires heating the oxides of the three elements together at about 1,200 °C (2,200 °F). (Manganese is quite common, and while yttrium is of perhaps middling rarity it's still more common than indium.)

While the prohibitive cost of YInMn Blue means I regrettably won't be able to get my hands on any to try it out any time soon, it's interesting to reflect on the historic costs of painting. While even the costs I noted above will add up over time, we're currently living in the best time ever for pigment costs. Modern chemistry has rendered pigment-making easier and cheaper than ever before in history. As an example, the pigment ultramarine used to be made of crushed-up lapis-lazuli, mined in Afghanistan and imported to Europe. Because of the labor involved, it literally cost more than its weight in gold in the Middle Ages. (Which is why it gets used so sparingly in famous Renaissance paintings!) The gold price listed for today in AUD is $77.77 per gram; multiply by gold's density of 19.3 g/ml to get a cost of $1,500.96/ml. By that metric, YInMn Blue paint is still 256 times less expensive than gold by volume. Unfortunately I don't know the density of YInMn Blue pigment so I can't compare them by weight (which would make the most sense), so comparing by volume, which is how paint is sold, will have to do.

Oh, and the ultramarine that used to be so expensive? We can now produce the relevant molecule synthetically, and Derivan has it listed as a Series 2 (i.e., second-cheapest) paint at $12.95 a tube, or $0.17/ml. That's almost 8830 times cheaper than gold, showing just how much we artists have to be thankful about in this day and age. (I quite like ultramarine and have used it in several paintings, so I'll probably do a post on it at some point.) Anyway, that's enough for now, and maybe in a few years the price for YInMn Blue will come down too (due to improvements in the manufacturing process or economies of scale) and I'll be able to actually try some. Who knows? A hui hou!

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!

Pigment Palaver: Prussian Blue

Boy, July has just flown by, hasn't it? I realize it's been pretty quiet on the blog front this month, mostly because I've been busy finally getting some results from my research after almost a year spent tracking down and compensating for various systematic errors, and I'm usually left too tired to feel much like writing. I've also been in a bit of a rush up to a fortnight ago getting some artworks done for an Apollo 11 50^th-anniversary exhibition. (A topic for another time!)

Two weeks ago, however, we finally got all the paintings and other artwork finished, packed up, and off to the gallery, so I've been getting inspired and feeling like painting again. I've gone back and worked some more on a painting I started back in December, and due to painting the ocean in five different shades of blue today I wanted to talk about one specific color I used: Prussian blue.

Prussian Blue

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This dark, intense blue, also sometimes known as Berlin blue, Paris blue, or Parisian blue, takes it most-widely known name from the state of Prussia, whose capital was Berlin. (For those familiar with European history from the 16^th century onward the military exploits of Prussia are practically legendary, but I don't know how familiar it is to the average person nowadays.) It was invented in about 1706 by a paintmaker by the name of Diesbach (possible first names of “Johann Jacob”) and seems to have received its name sometime in the next few years, as it was being marketed as Prussian blue or Berlin blue by 1709.

Prussian blue has the chemical formula Fe^III₄[Fe^II(CN)₆]₃, and despite having a lot of cyanide groups (the CN groups) is completely non-toxic, and in fact is used an antidote to poisoning by certain heavy metals such as thallium. (It's even on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines as a result.) Blueprints take their name from this pigment, and it's interesting as the first of the modern synthetic pigments. Although some synthetic pigments were used in antiquity, such as Egyptian blue, the knowledge of how to make them had been lost to time. European painters who wanted blue were stuck with either a variety of pigments that weren't particularly light-fast over time, or ultramarine blue made from ground-up lapis-lazuli, which was literally more expensive than gold. It's thus hard to overstate just how revolutionary Prussian blue—a light-fast, strong, and affordable pigment—really was at the time.

Of course, being light-fast and cheap are nice, but artists care about the color, and Prussian blue really delivers on that front. It was one of the first few colors of paint I picked up, so in my very first painting (below) pretty much all the blue (in the ice and snow) comes from Prussian blue. It works really well, even mixed with copious amounts of titanium white (as it's actually a very dark blue when pure), and really shows it versatility. In the painting I mentioned in the opening paragraph I'm using it in a completely opposite role, as the deep dark blue of the deep ocean, showing just what a wide range it can play and why it's so useful to an artist.

Prussian blue was the first of the modern synthetic pigments, and its discovery sparked a whole new era for painters, who are blessed nowadays with a range of synthetically-created pigments with colors, intensities, light-fastnesses, and cheap prices that the Old Masters could scarcely have dreamed of. And while plenty of the synthetic pigments created in the years since have faded away into obscurity, Prussian blue is still going strong. I've got a painting in mind to do in which Prussian blue will probably play a large part, as it's almost the perfect shade of blue to match one of my favorite animals—but that'll come in due time; I haven't even started it yet! All in all, if you're looking for a versatile blue pigment with an impressive pedigree and even lifesaving properties, you could do far worse than Prussian blue. A hui hou!

Pigment Palaver: Titanium White

One of the things I enjoy about paint is how the various pigments involved are intimately tied up with chemistry, another of my loves. The properties of a pigment—a substance used to give color to paint—are directly connected to its chemical composition and makeup.

With this post I want to start an irregular series discussing various pigments found in paints both modern and historical. Pigments span all of human history: red and yellow iron oxide are found in cave paintings, are probably among the first pigments people ever used—and yet are still found in paints today. On the recent end of the scale, a beautiful new blue pigment variously called Oregon blue or Yin Min blue (from its chemical composition, YInMn) was only discovered in 2009 and has only just started to come to market in paint form in the past two years. (It's actually not even available commercially in the U.S. yet, only from a paint company in Australia. It's also significantly more expensive than most paint at the moment due to its composition so I probably won't get my hands on any for a while, though I would like to do a post on it.)

One thing I didn't realize until recently was just how many historical pigments used by the Old Masters were actually quite toxic; painting used to be a pretty dangerous hobby! Thanks to modern chemistry, however, we're blessed today with a wide variety of non-toxic pigments with light-fastness and cheapness that the painters of yesteryear could only dream about.

For this post, I specifically want to talk about a relatively recent pigment (brought to paint form only in the 1920s or so), but an incredibly important one to the modern world. In paint form it's called Titanium White, which comes from the fact that it's simply titanium dioxide, TiO\(_2\). Titanium dioxide is estimated to be used in up to two-thirds of all pigments globally, because it has a reach far outside of art: its various properties mean that it's found as a coloring agent in things as diverse as foods, toothpastes, and sunscreen.

Titanium White

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Titanium dioxide is a relatively common, naturally occurring substance. Oxygen makes up the largest portion of the Earth's crust by mass, and titanium follows in seventh place, so it makes sense that their combination is pretty abundant. Common ores include rutile, anatase, brookite, and ilmenite, and global production of titanium dioxide is in the millions of tons each year.

Titanium in general is a very safe metal, biologically speaking. It basically doesn't interact with the body at all, which is why so many implants are made out of it. Its oxide is likewise safe, and is used in all sorts of white food dyes as a result.

The whiteness of titanium dioxide is truly remarkable, reflecting nearly 100% of light falling on it at all wavelengths across the visible spectrum (though it starts to fall off a bit in the ultraviolet). Its reflectance is still high enough that it's used in sunscreens (it's what makes them so white) in order to give them their Sun-blocking power.

This incredible whiteness also makes titanium dioxide useful in paints, where it provides a great opaque white with amazing covering power. It can also be mixed with pretty much any color to lighten it (though it can overpower things if used too much). It's one of the first colors of paint I bought, and it's also the first one I've nearly used a whole tube of so far, showing just how much more of this pigment I use compared to everything else.

Due to its amazing coverage and reflectance, titanium dioxide is justifiably one of the most important pigments in painting, and in the wider world globally. One interesting tidbit of information about titanium dioxide that I couldn't fit in elsewhere is that M-class red dwarf stars are cool enough (only a few thousand kelvins) that they show bands of absorption from it in their atmospheres, adding a heavenly connection to this common earthly pigment. I've used it in most of my paintings so far, and that will likely continue to happen into the future! A hui hou!

(Oh, and I finished my star series of painting this week, so expect a post on them once I get around to getting some good quality pictures of them.)