A Payne in the Arts

Connections - The Route to Payne’s Grey

Nick sent me a link to a YouTube video showing his working process, made for Australian television. I thought it was interesting that he starts his paintings by blocking out the tones with Payne’s Grey.

You would usually work from light to dark with watercolours, though I’ve seen articles in The Artist magazine that advocate starting with the darks.

Establishing the tonal contrast early in the painting gives it depth that can easily be lost when concentrating on colour.

Lessons in Tertiary Greys (that should be the title of a book) at PSAD.

Grey is not just a mixture of black and white, and even if it was, the variations in black and white pigments allow you to create a wide variety of warm and cool greys. You can mix tertiary greys in many different ways but a good starting point is to mix a secondary colour with its complement (a primary) for example orange (secondary) mixed with blue (primary) or purple (secondary) mixed with yellow (primary), or you could mix 3 primaries (red,yellow and blue).

Tertiary greys make a painting interesting by their variety. You can mix any degree of warm, cool or neutral tones and create interesting effects by using mixtures of granulating and staining pigments.

The range of greys available is immense given the number of colours you can start with. Tertiary greys will always sit comfortably in the composition if they are mixed from colours used in the rest of the painting.

Experiments with Limited Palettes (another book title - the sqeaquel praps)

A few years ago I did a couple of summer schools at Putney School of Art and Design - painting classes with Ian Ellis and Graham Cole. Redcurrant themes in both were the use of limited colour palettes and mixing tertiary greys. Both techniques give a feeling of unity to a painting, although you can mix a wide variety of colours from your palette, the limited number of starting colours binds the picture together - the colours look as though they belong together.

Just Doodling

After watching Nick’s video I rummaged through my paints only to find the Payne’s Grey slot was empty. So, off to the shops I went.

I painted a few swatches in various dilutions and stared at them for a while. Winscale and Neutron’s Payne’s Grey is quite blue but leaning towards greenish.

Since I’d squeezed the new kid on the palette into an empty well alongside a couple of my limited Earth colour palettes, I thought I’d have a go at mixing it.

My latest colour scheme is based on what I thought Aaron Becker had used in his illustrated children’s book Journey - Prussian blue, alizarin crimson, burnt umber and yellow ochre.

I found I could get pretty close by mixing a bluish purple with Prussian blue and alizarin crimson then progressively adding yellow ochre. Along the way I made some rather nice looking greys.

Looking it oop on Wicky PDA.

I had a look on Wikipedia for information about Payne’s Grey and found it was named after the 18th century English watercolour painter William Payne who mixed this grey to give his paintings more luminosity than using black.

Guess what? He mixed iron (or Prussian) blue, crimson lake and yellow ochre or raw Sienna.

I looked on the tube for the pigment codes to see what Winscale and Neutron actually use. PB 15 - Copper phthalocyanine, PBk 6 - Carbon black, PV 19 - Quinacridone. So, a modern synthetic blue and crimson plus lamp black, but no yellow.

It’s amazing where a little thought or scrap of information can lead you.