Pigments & Dyes

Dyes & Pigments

Derived form natural sources and are organic; they can come from insects, animals, plants, trees, or in organic clays and minerals. These colorants can impart color to yarn, textile, and surfaces,

Pigments

These are used to make paints; finely ground, colored powders that remain suspended and insoluble. They can be combined with a binder or vehicle such as animal fat, plant gum, oil, egg white or yolk, or honey.

Red & Yellow Iron Oxide/Ocher

Abundant in earth; these supplied colors in prehistoric cave paintings.

Charred Bones

These were used for the black pigments in prehistoric cave paintings.

Lapis Lazuli

The rare semiprecious gemstone in Afghanistan, which was powdered to produce ultramarine (meaning “beyond the sea”) blue. It was popularly used in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Azurite & Malachite

Copper mineral sources of blue and green, respectively. These made up for the shortage of lapis lazuli.

Fresco

The technique of painting on wet plaster. Used as early as the Minoan civilization at Knossos Palace on Crete.

Vermillion

An orangish red pigment with excellent hiding power and good permanence. A brilliant scarlet red which is made from cinnabar, a sulfide of mercury mined at Almaden, Spain.

Terre Verte

A soft green color and was also known as Verona Green as it was mined near Verona, Italy. It is a transparent pigment with a low tinting strength perfect for mixing flesh tones.

Raw Sienna

It is named after the Tuscan city and is a dark yellow but turns reddish brown when heated or "burnt".

Umber

Its name is derived from the word shade. It originates from the hilly central region of Umbria. A natural mixture of iron and manganese oxides and hydroxides. It is a dark brown (because of its higher Manganese content) which is commonly burnt as well.

Fresco secco

The technique of painting on dry plaster with pigments mixed in water. Also known as dry fresco.

Buon fresco

True or wet fresco; its pigments are mixed with water and become chemically bound to the freshly laid lime plaster. It is painting executed on a freshly plastered wall.

Dyes

A natural or synthetic compound that is used to impart color to another material like yarn, textile, and other surfaces.

Madder, Weld, & Woad

These are plants which were the earliest known dyes.

Murex snail

Mediterranean sea snail whose shell contained glands that produced purple dye used to make expensive cloth. These were only reserved for the emperors of Rome to use. Also known as purpura.

Kermes

An insect which produces scarlet, a brilliant red color, from its unlaid eggs. These looked like berries which clung on to trees and shrubs.

Italy

The leading center for the production of expensive silk and dyes during the Middle Ages.

Mordants

Chemical compounds that bonded the dye to the fabric. Most plants require this chemical to create brighter, more permanent colors, and sources ranged from mineral salts to acidic compounds.

Alum Mordant

It is a common mordant, chemical compound of aluminum, sulfate and potassium.

Alchemy

Medieval chemical philosophy based on changing metal into gold. Part magic and part chemistry, it was an ancient art that evolved from metalwork. It was passed down by Arab scholars, influenced by the Greek philosophy and then filtered through Europe in the twelfth century.

Indigo

It is one of the oldest plant dyes, and one that yields a deep, strong blue. It was brought form Asia to Europe by Venetian and Genoese traders. It is more expensive than woad and required no mordant. It produced a richer, more durable color with a smaller quantity of dye.

Scarlet

A brilliant red color which originated from the Kermes insect.

Cochineal

It is a parasite, one that attaches itself to the cactus plants; for centuries, it had been a source of red dye for the native Indians of Mexico and central America. It produces carmine or crimson lake, a bright red color.

Cassius purple

A blue-red that was named after the alchemist who discovered it. It can be used in coloring glass and porcelain.

Prussian blue

Also known as Berlin blue, it is a dark blue pigment produced by oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts. It was made by Johann Konrad Dippel and Diesbach. They used tainted potassium to mix red and accidentally discovered this deep blue.

Aniline

Discovered by German chemist Otto Unverdorben, it is a dye which comes from distilling liquid from the indigo plant.

Mauve

Discovered in 1856 by William Henry Perkin in an attempt to synthesize quinine while using coal tar. He created the first aniline dye purple.

Magenta

Discovered by Perkin's teacher, August Wilhelm von Hoffman in 1858.

Fuchsia

A vivid purplish-red color like that of the sepals of a typical fuchsia flower. The flower took its name from from a 16th-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs.

vehicle

a liquid, paste, wax, or other substance that holds particles of pigments (dyes or other colorants) together without dissolving them and act as a binder that adheres the pigments to the painted surface.

Fugitive pigment

The tendency for pigment to change color under natural influences (light, heat, water)

color fastness

having color that retains its original hue without fading or running

vanta black

is a brand name for a class of super-black coatings with total hemispherical reflectances (THR) below 1.5% in the visible spectrum.

dyestuff

a substance that yields a dye or that can be used as a dye, especially when in solution.

Azo dyes

A large group of synthetic petroleum based dyes with greater color features prescribed by aniline dye.

Verdigris

A moderately-transparent bluish green with low stability. It's a copper acetate, used often, from antiquity through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque.

Carbon Black

a black was used as a pigment since very earliest times.re made by heating wood, or other plant material, with a very restricted air supply. Sticks of charcoal have been used for sketching by artists of all periods, and traces of their work may be found on the ground layer of paintings.

Lead White

has the warmest masstone of all the whites. It has a very subtle reddish-yellow undertone. is a carbonate of lead which was in use since antiquity and was prepared from metallic lead and vinegar.

Egyptian blue

Very stable synthetical pigment of varying blue colour. It is a copper calcium silicate that was the first synthetic pigment and the most extensively used from the early dynasties in Egypt until the end of the Roman period in Europe.

Malachite

It's a mineral basic copper carbonate, moderately permanent pigment of varying colour.is perhaps the oldest known green pigment. It is sensitive to acids and to heat. Occurs in Egyptian tomb paintings, in european paintings it seems to have been of importance mainly in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Orpiment

A rich lemon or canary yellow with fair covering power and good chemical stability. It's an arsenic sulfide which naturally occurs widely, but in relatively small deposits. I

Madder Lake

It's a lake derived from the extract of the madder plant's root (rubia tintorum) which the principle coloring substance is alizarin plus purpurin which is fading. It is one of the most stable natural pigments. It was in use by the ancient Egyptians for coloring textiles and then was continuosly used until today.

Realgar

Red orange natural pigment closely related to the yellow orpiment. The two minerals are often found in the same deposits. Highly toxic arsenic sulfide and was the only pure orange pigment until modern chrome orange.

Titanium White

Strongest, most brilliant white available to artists in the entire history of art. Excellent hiding power and with twice the opacity of pure lead white. Its chemical stability is likewise outstanding.