MITRA Forum Question Details

Hello there,

From my experience the differences between the ranges and brands aren't huge. And definitely one colour can be better with one brand and another better with the other brand.

Bottom line, if you take the same colour, like ultramarine blue, in every range​ and brand, and mix it with the same ratio of the same white, you should start seeing the colour strength differences. Higher ranges are supposed to have more pigment. Repeat that for every single pigmented colour that appears identical across all of them and you can evaluate each range and brand against one another. 

Hopefully the lasting quality is good for each of them, but it's harder to judge. I guess you could check drying time. I'd be curious to hear more about the colours you tested and which ones from winsor you say weren't good. 

And personally I'd like to know what's the deal with Georgian's primary read being a dioxazine purple. They're the only ones I've seen with this pink-red PV23, and they don't even use it in their Artist's range?

(I asked them and they said it's correct, but...)

cheers and merry holidays,

Lussh

if you take the same colour, like ultramarine blue, in every range ​ and brand, and mix it with the same ratio of the same white, you should start seeing the colour strength differences. Higher ranges are supposed to have more pigment. Repeat that for every single pigmented colour that appears identical across all of them and you can evaluate each range and brand against one another. Hopefully the lasting quality is good for each of them, but it's harder to judge.​

Tinting tests, which are so frequently suggested and used by artists, are problematic for two reasons:

1) Coarser grinds (particularly a coarse grind that has been carefully prepared to remove finer particles) will have lower tinting but some pigments have more intensity and/or more lightfastness when more coarsely ground.

2) Similarly, pigments can be prepared to be more opaque and less opaque. Typically, opaque versions (such as PY 83) are more lightfast than transparent versions — although not for every example. Opaque versions often have a larger particle size and reduced tinting and saturation, with better lightfastness.

3) Companies know that tinting tests can be fooled by goosing a pigment with something else. Viridian, for instance, can have PG 7 added to give it more power in tinting tests (and in masstone). The irony here is that the brand that could be cutting quality is rewarded with the praise of the reviewer and the commenters. It's also ambiguous, particularly for those who only want to have a single tube of green paint in their palette, if having viridian with some PG 7 is actually a downgrade. Some may find it an upgrade. Different artists have different criteria. The staining nature and inferior lightfastness of PG 7 could be a problem for watercolorists but for oil painters the added oomph might be seen as a boon.

The only way tinting tests can be relied upon is when the source pigment is identical. Since companies don't tell you and even if they would they have to rely on the integrity of their supplier... Otherwise, unless you can pay for a lab to quantify the ingredients and amounts, it's guesswork.

Then, as the other commenter mentioned, there is the issue of the stability of the product. Different pigments with the same color index (e.g. PY 83) can have different levels of lightfastness (in some cases — all chromium oxide PG 17 is going to be absolutely lightfast). The many substitutions for linseed oil used in paints can have quite an effect on stability, from the migration of stearate to create a whitish haze on the surface of the paint film to cracking/delamination from zinc oxide, to paint film solubility problems caused by wax, to embrittlement from the shrinkage of alternative drying oils (sunflower being the worst, according to one conservationist's chart, due to it losing the most mass).

There are several issues to consider when looking at value in paint:

1) Does the company pride itself on archival qualities (longevity), or does it promote other things, such as natural dyes? To make this confusing, some companies do both — making high-quality paints with stable formulations as well as romance paints with fugitive dyes. Also, goosed paints are something that one major company admitted to doing, with its iron oxide paints. Finding that out is very surprising as paint companies practically never give out any information that damages credibility. But, goosed paint can "win" the ooo... what pretty colors paint reviews, and that includes tinting tests.

2) Does the company provide reliable data to show that its product is reliable or does it hide most (or all) of its information behind the wall of trade secret secrecy?

3) How much quality are you willing to sacrifice to ease of use? Stabilizers are essential to maintain oil paint shelf life for years. They affect the handling, pigmentation, and potentially the long-term stability of the paint. This is most obvious when comparing tubed tempera paint with hand-made. On the opposite end are watercolors, which are good enough when manufactured well.

3) "You get what you pay for" is almost always true to some degree. It is very difficult to outwit businesses that have been going for hundreds of years, like the paint industry. There is a lot of competition and thin margins. However, there are exchange rate differences as well as mindshare. Mindshare = can price higher even though quality isn't higher than some other competitor's product. Also, since there is a general lack of knowledge among artists about the subtleties of paint (and lots of "ooo... what pretty colors reviews), there is a lot of product redundancy.

4) Formulations can change at any time, without you being notified. Pigments are also being re-sourced, as various pigments come, various producers change, and companies find lower-priced bids. I have two tubes of cobalt violet light from the same company. One weighs half as much as the other. My guess is that the older tube was formulated with blanc fixe and the other with a much lighter filler.

5) Barium sulfate (blanc fixe and baryte) is heavy. Sometimes people mistake the weight of a tube of paint with pigmentation. It's easy to make a very heavy tube of paint with an extremely low pigment load by using mostly barium sulfate.

Basically, I would not expect a budget paint line to beat a pro-level paint line on anything except cost of entry. However, even the expensive of the pro-level paint lines can have turkeys that one must be knowledgeable to avoid. For example, one otherwise excellent paint producer sells "cobalt violet" paints that are mixtures of three pigments, not one of which is cobalt violet. That is inexcusable but I won't say I won't buy any of their products because they made that substandard choice. Other otherwise excellent brands have been selling fugitive paints like aureolin (PY 40) watercolors. That is also inexcusable but it happens nonethless. Learning as much as possible is the only good solution to the problem of quality, as business hides so much behind secrecy and romance. On the flip side, although this is much much less an issue, in terms of the overall communication level, are the gotcha testers who overblow potential problems with some pigments by subjecting them to inappropriate conditions (such as weather exposure for cadmium yellow).

— SRS

The page automatically reloaded itself without warning for no apparent reason and I lost a huge post of very useful info that I wrote.

— SRS​

In essence, while Georgian oil paints are positioned as student grade, they can yield impressive results when handled and cared for meticulously. When used conscientiously with good practices, they have the potential to produce paintings that endure over time.

It's also advisable to conduct personal tests, creating a small-scale sample using the specific colors and techniques you intend to use, and observe their behavior over time to gauge their permanence and performance according to your expectations.

Ultimately, the outcome of any painting, regardless of the paint grade, hinges on the artist's skill, technique, and the care taken in the creation process.​

Hi,

I was referring to the oil as the stabilizer. As you wrote, tempera can't be tubed with adequate stability without it.

Sorry for any confusion.

— SRS

In essence, while Georgian oil paints are positioned as student grade, they can yield impressive results when handled and cared for meticulously. When used conscientiously with good practices, they have the potential to produce paintings that endure over time.

It's also advisable to conduct personal tests, creating a small-scale sample using the specific colors and techniques you intend to use, and observe their behavior over time to gauge their permanence and performance according to your expectations.

Ultimately, the outcome of any painting, regardless of the paint grade, hinges on the artist's skill, technique, and the care taken in the creation process.​

Artist skill and materials quality are often not interchangeable. For example, a particular paint brand sold tubes of vermilion paint that resulted in opaque white patches forming on the dried paint film. This happened with plain red areas on multiple paintings. The artist's skill didn't affect the outcome, nor could the artist anticipate this result and adjust for it in terms of the painting technique and similar matters (such as support choice).

Instead, it was a defective product.

With current oil painting products, users cannot perform truly long-term testing, as those tests take longer than the artists will live. Some problems, such as ultramarine sickness, can take longer than the artist's lifetime to manifest. Others may take several decades. If an artist is 60 and the testing requires fifty years to be fully adequate, the artist would be 110 by the time he/she would know the product meets or does not meet his/her needs.

Given trade secrecy, artists have no way to really know how their products will perform, unless they can use products that have nothing left to chance. An example of that is verified dry pigment (verified in terms of its actual content, in totality) verified oil, verified stabilizers (if any), et cetera, hand-made.

— SRS