5 - Mixing with Indian Red

This is my 5th in my series on mixing with my Ultimate Mixing Palette colours. Just one more to go - mixing with Jane's Grey.

Indian Red is an interesting paint. It is the most opaque of any Daniel Smith watercolour I've used. It is best to use it without fiddling with it as the heavy pigment can be hard to control. What I love about it though is that it is the perfect colour for lips and the 'pink' of eyes in portraits, provided it is very diluted. It can also be used in mixes to paint the more red-toned skin. It is also lovely as an earth triad with Cerulean Chromium and Goethite for subdued paintings, and can be very useful for painting landscapes and rust.

Of my 15 palette colours, this is the one that is perhaps least used, but it completes the set of earth yellows (Goethite and Raw Umber), earth orange (Burnt Sienna) and earth Red (Indian Red) along with the earth blue Cerulean Chromium. An interesting earth green choice would be chromium green oxide but I would prefer Serpentine Genuine or Green Apatite Genuine.

Indian Red is made from PR101, one of the multi-personality pigments that can be anything from a transparent burnt orange colour, through a range of Venetian red and light red hues to a transparent brown.  Like PBr7 and PV19, the pigment number alone isn't enough to know what the paint will look like.

A Question of Hues - Jane's Gold

I recently found an old pan of Winsor and Newton genuine Quinacridone Gold watercolour. PO49. (I had already stocked up on old supplies of the W&N acrylic version :-) Needless to say I snatched it up as I was curious to see how their version compared with the Daniel Smith colour I know and love. Daniel Smith bought up the last supplies of this pigment many years ago and are the only ones still making the genuine version. On the screen they look very alike, though in real life the DS is a little warmer. It is interesting to note that a number of the DS colours that used to have PO49 are now using PO48 or other pigments.

What I have always tried to understand is why Winsor & Newton make such a complex and ugly hue of this colour. They use PY150 - a lovely slightly acid transparent yellow that is an excellent base colour, and is available in W&N as Transparent Yellow or M.Graham and Daniel Smith as Nickel Azo Yellow; PR206 a burnt red, available in W&N as Brown Mader, Daniel Smith as Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet and Daler Rowney as Transparent Red Brown; and PV19 - a rose to violet pigment. W&N Quin Gold (hue) ends up being a very dirty colour, with too much violet-red though once again that is difficult to see on the screen. If they simply mixed the PY150 with their own Burnt Sienna PR101 they would have a cleaner colour that exactly matches genuine Quinacridone Gold. Other companies make the hue with PY150 + PO48 or other variations. Once again, the simplest solution is the best? Anyway, my quin gold hue - Jane's Gold - is PY150 (DS Nickel Azo Yellow) + PR101 (W&N Burnt Sienna) :-)

So how much of each? Making Jane's Gold :-)

 I have used with a half pan and added a decent blob of Nickel Azo Yellow PY150, but left room to mix. Then a much smaller blob of W&N Burnt Sienna PR101. It really depends on the brands you are using how much you need. I mixed these thoroughly with a very fine quill (or use a metal skewer of needle) and came up with a colour that is still too yellow.

 Here is the first mix - not enough PR101

So I added another small blob using the tip of a palette knife - you can see the small blob in the corner of the palette

 The second mix is warmer, but not deep enough and still too much yellow in a wash.

So I added the third small blob amount again, stirred it well, and came out with a very close match, pictured on the left.

Here is my mix compared with the actual PO49 paint. I estimate it is 5 parts PY150:1 part PR101, but the different brands will be different thicknesses so there is no magic formula.

Here is my testing page. You can see Quin gold mixed with Ultramarine on the top left, Jane's gold with Ultramarine below it. It could still have a little more PR101 but is very close. The thing about making your own custom mixes is you can decide exactly what warmth to take it to.

Other good Quin gold hue mixes are PY150 + PO48, PY129 + PBr7 and even PY97 as a base yellow colour.

And here are the pigments in their pure form.

Happy custom mixing :-)

To see my Jane's Grey custom mix, click here
For Jane's Black and other custom mixes click here
For more custom mixes (Jane's golden Earth, Jane's Sienna and Jane's Earth Rose) click here.