Know Your Reds

[laudesan]

Red is an extremely dominant colour and even a small piece in a painting will draw in your eye.

It's the colour associated with love, passion, anger, heat, fire, and blood.

The various red pigments available to artists each have their own characteristics and degrees of permanency.

The first two reds were introduced by ancient Egyptians artists – one made from cinnabar (vermilion) and one from madder root. Prior to this, palettes were restricted to black, white, and ochres.

Cadmium red: Available in light, medium, and deep (or dark). A very strong, warm, opaque reds. Tend to blacken when mixed with copper pigments. Toxic. Mix cadmium red medium with cadmium yellow medium for a warm orange.

Scarlet Lake: A bright, intense red, with a slight tendency towards blue. A strong colour good for glazing or washes. Also known as toluidine red, bright red, vermilionette.

Alizarin crimson: A dark, transparent, cool red with a slight tendency towards blue/purple. Add to other reds to darken or deepen them. Good for transparent glazing or washes as it will add depth without obscuring any details. A synthetic pigment related to traditional rose madder. Also known as alizarin madder, rose madder alizarin, alizarin carmine.

Vermilion: A bright, intense red made from sulphur and mercury (mercuric sulphide). Toxic and prone to turning black in sunlight. Traditionally reserved for key figures in a painting. Being a very expensive pigment, it's now available as a hue. Also known as cinnabar vermilion, scarlet vermilion.

Carmine: A traditional red that's fugitive, but is now manufactured in permanent versions (sold as permanent carmine).Rose madder: A distinctive, transparent red. Made from rose madder root. Also known as madder lake, madder pink.

Quinacridone red. Mix with ultramarine to get a brilliant purple and with Payne's grey for a dull purple. Also known as permanent rose, red rose, permanent magenta.

Venetian red: A warm, earth red with a slight tendency towards orange. Made from natural or synethetic iron oxide. Also known as red ochre, light red.

Indian red: A warm, dark earth red with a tendency towards blue. Makes cool colours when mixed. Made from natural iron oxide.Earth reds are closely related to brown ochres and umbers. Names include red ochre, red oxide, Mars red, burnt sienna, terra rosa, red earth.

Tips:• Adding white to red will not create a lighter tint of red, but a pink.• A pigment that fades when exposed to light will fade faster if used on a white background than on a dark one.• Pigments that aren't permanent are best used full strength, rather than as tints.• Artist's quality paints are classified into series, indicated by a number on the tube, costing increasingly more as the pigment becomes more expensive. So, for example, in Winsor & Newton oils, bright red is series one, cadmium red is series four, and carmine is series 6.• Remember that using a complementary colour intensifies a colour.• Make use of the fact that red appears to 'advance' against a green or dark blue, which appear to 'receed'

Pam (pampe) was asking about reds the other day, and I just found this while searching the web for stuff on shadows

Hope you all find it helpful

[Yorky]

How about Light Red - a browny red which when added to ultramarine blue in small quantities creates a cold grey?

Doug

[laudesan]

Great Doug......Thank you I have written that down in my list

[Strawberry Wine]

Thanks JJ and Doug I have printed this out So very helpful, cause I hate painting reds. I worked on a bowl of strawberries for the card exchange yesterday and scrubbed it out. Will try again, using this info.

Gail

[Sylvielu]

Thanks for posting this JJ. It is very imformative.

[artmom]

JJ, thanks for the tips. Could you cite your source for this info, please?

Lyn

[Scioscia]

This looks familiar, but I wouldn't have known where to locate it if I'd remembered it exhisted. Thanks so much for posting it. I too, have printed this for future reference.

[laudesan]

Source of info........ http://painting.about.com/library/bl...olours-red.htm

Very remiss of me not putting it in

There is a LOT of interesting "stuff" on this site..

[ArtistGary]

Great short treatise on all things red, JJ. I'll be referrubg to it repeatedly.

[dspinks]

Useful info JJ - I always have a hard time deciding which red to use.

One quick note about complementary color - rather than intensifying color, it actually neutralizes or desaturates color. It may make the shade darker, but the original chroma will be less intense.

Debra

[matingara]

JJ,

Did you note that your Rose Madder description has been subsumed and categorized under carmine?

Rose madder is a very important transparent red and needs its own heading!!!



Joel.

[laudesan]

Thank you Joel

[laudesan]

I have been searching for info on Rose madder, but all I could come up with was this:- (Siurce Handprint)


NR9 lake of natural madder, rubia tinctorium (antiquity) rose madder genuine Winsor & Newton 090 4 0 35 2 3 0 6 -2 2.0
NR9 rose madder genuine Daniel Smith 080 4 0 60 1 2 1 24 0 1.5
Genuine rose madder NR9 is a fugitive, transparent, nonstaining, mid valued, moderately dull rose pigment in tints and medium solutions, darkening to a marginally lightfast, dull magenta red in masstone. The ASTM (1999) rates its lightfastness in watercolors as "poor" (IV), as you can see from the comparable results in my own tests ("before" on top, "after on bottom):


Like alizarin crimson (PR83), rose madder is widely acknowledged to be a fugitive pigment. So you should base your decision to use it on on an actual lightfastness test rather than casual observation of paintings sitting around your studio for a year or two. Simply brush out a sample from masstone to undertone (flesh mixtures made with rose madder are usually tints), cut the swatch in half, put one half in a desk drawer and the other in a south facing window (make sure the window does not have UV protective glass), and at the end of two months of sunny days look at the consequences. You will see for yourself what you inflict on your own work, and on the good faith of your collectors, by continuing to use any paint that contains this pigment. I also believe that professional ethics, if not common decency, means informing your clients when a work contains this or any other impermanent pigment (such as alizarin crimson), so that collectors can decide for themselves whether they want to accept the risk, and if they do buy are forewarned to mount or store the work in ways that minimize strong light exposure. — To acquaint yourself with the rose madder color characteristics and mixing effects (important to 18th and 19th century painting practices), I recommend you use Winsor & Newton rose madder genuine, which is a fairly bright and clear color, flecked with interesting bits of vegetable matter; the pigment dissolves reluctantly and is relatively weak even in masstone. The Daniel Smith paint is surprisingly dark, dull and fugitive by comparison, apparently because the pigment was improperly processed. (The traditional methods of processing are cumbersome and time consuming; to my knowledge only Winsor & Newton still uses them.) — AVOID. A very old pigment manufactured from the root of any of several varieties of the rose madder plant, it is one of the traditional four transparent nonstaining pigments (with aureolin, viridian, and cobalt blue). It is still occasionally recommended by the older generation of workshop artists, although it is too fugitive for professional artistic work. Readily replaced by quinacridone rose (PV19), muted if desirable by a touch of quinacridone maroon (PR206) or quinacridone gold (PO48). See also the section on natural organic pigments.

[FriendCarol]

To quote an old commercial (forgot which product, though): Stop, you're both right! Complementary 'colors' (of paint) MIXED TOGETHER certainly neutralize one another; but placed NEXT TO each other they have... um, an emphatic effect.

Now, how can I say that better? A purple background makes yellow 'pop,' and vice versa. Oh, you know what I mean!

[dspinks]

Thanks, Carol, for that clarification - I was thinking mixture when I made my comment. The vibration of true complementaries next to each other is fantastic.

Debra