The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Think Pink!



Peony Love Affair     Oil     A. Trusty

   I am always inspired to paint the luscious and radiant colors of our peonies, especially the pink and coral ones. I have found that it can be a real challenge to match the range of sunlit pinks bouncing off and through their petals. Depending on the variety of peony, the colors can be soft, almost white, to brazenly intense! In temperature, the colors can range from cool, near-violet in the shadows, to warm and flashy orange-pink in the sunlit petals. One thing the colors are not, however, is easy to mix!

   We teach our students with a focus on a split primary palette—a warm and cool of the three primaries along with white and black. Within that limited palette we work with them to create almost every other color needed. However, we've found that there are some pinks in nature that are very difficult to create without the help of special pigments not generally found in our split primary palette. Part of the problem occurs when attempting to raise the value of a red to a pink by adding Titanium Dioxide White to a red pigment. White cools the red and reduces the translucency and chroma of the original pigment.

   When we search online for new (sometimes quite expensive) colors, it is hard to know exactly what they will look like on canvas. The manufacturers give them names, but the names don't tell much about the color's qualities—value or temperature, for instance. To explore as many of the options as we could, we purchased tubes of some of the rose, pink, opera, etc., colors offered by a variety of different manufacturers to create a Think Pink! color chart. Better yet, we made the chart compare the various pinks against a standard Cadmium Red Light so that even if screen colors vary, the constant of the Cadmium Red Light should help to show the differences in the other pinks.

   We began by sampling the reds we typically keep in our split primary palettes - Cadmium Red Light and Permanent Alizarin, as well as two other commonly used reds:  Cadmium Red Medium and Quinacridone Rose. Adding Titanium White to each of these shows their pink potential.

   The next two rows are colors from a variety of top oil paint manufacturers:  Charvin, Holbein, Gamblin, Vasari, Schmincke, Old Holland, Williamsburg, Winsor & Newton and Senelier—each a different rose or pink. Some lean toward the cool, with a bluer tint and some toward the warm with an oranger tint.

   The bottom row are tube colors in cooler shades, useful for some of the bluer shades found in shadows on pink surfaces.

   To understand the permanence rating, lightfastness and pigment used in each color, be sure to check the pigment numbers listed on the tube. Operas, for example, are known for having a lower lightfastness rating.

Filtered Light          Oil          A. Trusty