Paint Colors, Techniques, Best Practices, and more! Special Q&A Session with Gamblin

Antrese Wood: Hello, it's Antrese and welcome to the Savvy Painter Podcast. A few weeks ago, I put out a call to see if you had any questions about color for Gamblin Artists Colors. Once again, I turned over the questioning to you.

This week to answer your questions, I have the founder of Gamblin, Robert Gamblin and Gamblin product manager Scott Gellatly. As founder of the company, Robert Gamblin has been obsessed with leading oil painting into the future and most importantly, keeping artists safe by carefully selecting the materials that we use every day.

As product manager at Gamblin Artists Colors, Scott Gellatly has the job artists dream of, a seemingly infinite supply of paints to play with. Okay, so I know that no one's job is all rainbows and unicorns, but in my imagination, Scott's job is pretty close.

Both Robert and Scott are also artists, which makes their knowledge and perspective even more intriguing, because they walk the walk. In our last episode with Gamblin, we talked extensively about studio safety, varnishes, and mediums. If you didn't get a chance to listen to it, I highly, highly recommend you listen to it now or after this episode.

Since we covered all of that In the last episode, for this episode, we decided to talk about pigments and colors. I remember back when I was first starting out, I brought rolls of coins from my waitressing job to the art store.

When you're that tight on money, every nickel counts, and I always wondered, “Was it better to splurge on the artist grade materials, or was I okay with a student grade for now? How exactly were those two lines different? Why are cadmium and cobalt so expensive? Do I really need them? What's the deal with all those colors with names that I can't even pronounce?”

Just like with the last episode with Gamblin, this episode is filled with a ton of great information that you can use today in your studio. You guys asked some great, great questions and Robert and Scott definitely know their stuff. As usual, Gamblin really went the extra mile. Normally, Savvy Painter episodes are about an hour, but there was just so much great information about color that we added almost another half hour.

Then we even had extra questions about oil painting materials, so we created a special bonus Q&A. This is information you won't get anywhere else. Scott is super, super generous with his knowledge. We recorded an extra half hour of Q&A so we could get to all of the questions that were submitted before the deadline.

After you listen to this episode, if that wasn't enough for you, you can get that recording plus the transcripts of this episode when you sign up for Gamblin's monthly mailing list. Go to gamblincolors.com/bonus to get that extra recording and the transcripts for both calls. So here we go. Please welcome Robert Gamblin and Scott Gellatly.

So, Robert and Scott, thank you so much for being on the show.

Robert Gamblin: It's great to be here. Thanks for having us back, Antrese.

Scott Gellatly: Great to be here. Absolutely.

Antrese Wood: I'm super excited to have you guys on to answer these questions about color. Our first one is from James, and James has heard that modern oil paints actually have too much pigment as compared to traditional historic pigments. What are your thoughts on this?

Robert Gamblin: Antrese, I love this question. I'm really glad that James brought it up. It gives us a chance at the beginning of this conversation to sort of put everything into kind of a historical perspective. It's true. The formula of today's colors have more pigment in them than at any time in the history of oil painting. That's true.

Now the formula for the colors of today and the colors from historical periods, both of those reflect what is expected of them. Now 200 years ago or more, color was made and used in very close proximity. Perhaps it was made and used in the same room. The color was made to the texture that it was going to be used at.

So there was no need to make that paint any stiffer than the very smooth painting that was done at that time. Paintings were generally thinner than they are today. Multiple layers, those layers were very thin. So the paint was made exactly to how the painter was going to use them.

Today, our paints are used in the same building, which is where my studio is, but also they're used many thousands of miles away. They must meet a huge spectrum of needs for how that color is going to work. Secondly, there may be many months to years between when a color is made and when it is used up.

I'm sure that many of the listeners today have tubes of paint in the paint box that have been in there for 10 years or more. When you reach for that color, you expect that it is perfectly usable.

So we sort of solve this by making paint no stiffer than is needed. Palette knife painters need paint to be fairly stiff, painters who paint with an impasto need paint to be very stiff. You can't make paints stiffer very easily at all, but you can certainly make paint looser. For everyone who needs paint looser, that's what all the mediums are for.

We also like to define it in this way: that there's no need for us to make paint any stiffer than it takes to paint in an impasto on a 90-degree day. The warmer it is, the looser the paint is. 90 degrees and impasto, that's our maximum.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, that's really interesting because when you said that, I was thinking, “I do still have tubes of paint from when I was in school.” I don't know how that happens, but I do. I'm kind of curious, how do you come up with the standard for that? What is your guide for the color-making?

Robert Gamblin: Well, our guide for color imaging is really pretty complex and it's something that we take very seriously. In addition to artistic practice, our guides are history, science, and emotion.

All of these factor into our color-making. Now on our website, there is a whole section called "Experience Color" and it goes into this question in very great detail, into really excellent videos that we have posted there. On those videos, one of the things that I think is most important is that we discuss how every culture has an emotional resonance and our formulas strive to produce that emotional resonance, that maximum color as best that we can.

Now, to give an example of that with one of the most historically important colors, let's take ultramarine blue. If you add too much pigment to ultramarine blue, the color starts to get dull and the texture gets to become leaden. Too little pigment and you might have a really beautiful glossy color, but the texture is destroyed. There's a very fine area between too much and not enough.

Another color, Alizarin Crimson, it comes to us as the biggest particle size of anything else that we buy. An important part of our work and to produce that really sparkly, glowing, transparent, beautiful, cool red is to make that particle smaller and smaller and smaller until light comes off of it in a very smooth sheen rather than in a pebbly surface.

The last thing I want to mention about this is the idea of texture. Now there's one very good company in the world making oil paints who believes that there is a perfect texture for oil paint. They manipulate every one of their colors to try to meet that perfect texture.

We feel totally different. We feel that the natural texture that comes along with each pigment is something to be retained rather than something to manipulate. The texture of cadmium red medium, something that's dense but really smooth, is very different than the texture of Hansa Yellow Medium, which is very light in the density of its paste, but it's very sticky as a color. These things are all part of what goes into the process of trying to make our colors or the philosophy that we have behind paint making.

Antrese Wood: Can you give an example of what you mean by the emotional content of a color and how that impacts how you make paint?

Robert Gamblin: Well, we feel that the emotional content of color is its primary communication. So the difference in what cadmium red medium is saying to us compared to what Manganese Blue Hue was saying to us, cadmium red medium is very hot, it's very intense. It could express a feeling of rage, it could be expressing the feeling of just intensity of love that you can't hardly handle.

Then there's Manganese Blue Hue, just the coolest dude on the whole planet who just wants to be there and be just gorgeous looking and really, really deep in space. These two are the most important qualities that a color has. We use them for a very ends. We use them to describe how a building looks and describe how a person's face looks, but these emotional contents, I think, are there in everything that we do with paint.

Antrese Wood: Nice. Manganese Blue has become my new best friend recently. My next question comes from Rachel Jones.

Rachel Jones: Okay. My name is Rachel Jones of Rachel Jones and Art, and I have to say that I really appreciated the points that were made in the last podcast concerning whites and how we sometimes work against what the whites are made to do and just end up wasting paint because we're trying to make it behave in a way that it really shouldn't.

I was wondering, are there any other paints that maybe we may be wasting our time that really have a certain character that we are trying to make it act in a way that it shouldn't?

Scott Gellatly: It's a great question. Ultimately, I think it expands upon the notion of the different colors having different personalities that Robert just talked about. It doesn't take long for us as painters to recognize that phthalo green behaves very differently than a color such as Viridian.

I think the core of this difference is getting to know the difference between mineral and organic pigments, such as cobalt, chromium, and cadmium versus modern organics. These differences are highlighted and organized in our artist grade color chart in a very clear way.

Those mineral colors, which include those compounds of metals, such as cadmium, cobalt, and chromium, are developed at incredibly high heat. These are essentially the colors of impressionism. They have very large particle sizes and they naturally are more matte and a bit denser. They're excellent for naturalistic color mixing and replicating those colors of the natural world.

On the modern organic side, those are colors that contain carbon and have more tongue-twisting of color names like the phthalos, the dioxazines, the quinocridones. They have very different personalities. Instead of very dense opaque colors, they are a little softer in their texture, they're more transparent, and they have incredibly high tinting strengths and they make very intense tints and mixers.

This comes back to that difference between a phthalo green and Viridian. When we're dealing with creating a palette that incorporates both mineral and modern colors, I think that it really heightens the experience of painting by getting to know and celebrating these different personalities.

Phthalo Green as opposed to Viridian, Dioxazine Purple as opposed to Cobalt Violet, quinacridone as opposed to alizarin, they're excellent for creating color palettes of high chroma and of great intensity. Essentially, these colors have more cowbell than their mineral counterpart. They're excellent for really great passages of color with great intensity.

So to come back to the question, I think all of these colors are compatible with each other. They all play well with each other. It's just a matter of getting to know the different personalities of the pigments that we work with as painters.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, and I think something that I hear very often among painters, especially painters starting out is they're like, "Oh, my God, Phthalo Blue just takes over my palette." That sounds like it's part of what you're talking about, that Phthalos have such intense, strong tinting capabilities that just the slightest bit really impacts the color that you're mixing.

Scott Gellatly: Absolutely. A little bit goes a long way, but they can also be used to great advantage because of their intensity.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, usually when I'm using any of the Phthalos, when I pick it up on my knife, you can barely even see that I've picked it up on the knife. I use so little and just start that way as opposed to taking a big chunk because I know what it's going to do.

Scott Gellatly: Absolutely, absolutely.

Antrese Wood: Got it, so to answer Rachel's question, you're saying that understanding the difference between mineral and modern pigments allows you to use colors in ways that work for you and not against you. Awesome.

Okay, so Scott, can you tell me a little bit more about modern pigments and how they're different from the mineral pigments?

Scott Gellatly: Absolutely. I wanted to expand on this idea of the greater level of transparency of modern organic pigments. Traditionally, oil painting, prior to the Industrial Revolution, was dominated by indirect painting techniques. Rob alluded this earlier when he mentioned about thin applications of paint in multiple layers.

We recognize this when we're in a museum and we see the great works from the 15th through the 18th century where light gets trapped in these paint layers and are reflected through other areas of the painting and there's a great luminosity of the work of the old masters when there was this work being created by thin glaze layers and indirect painting techniques.

In the Industrial Revolution, when the palette was expanded with mineral colors such as cobalt, cadmium, chromium, this really led to the direct paintings and all the prima techniques of the impressionists, and those direct painting techniques really dominated 20th century painting.

What's exciting to me about the transparency of modern organics is that we now have this broad palette of intense colors with great transparency, so painters can go revisit what's historically been a very traditional mode of painting through glazing and indirect painting techniques. But with modern organic colors, with their greatest transparency, we can use those glazing techniques to create contemporary imagery.

Antrese Wood: I'm curious, so I have two questions to follow up on that. One is can you give me an example of, I mean, it may sound like an obvious question, but can you give an example of an indirect painting that's got that luminosity from the Old Masters? The second question is with the direct painting, was part of that ability to do that caused by the new paints, by new discovery in how paints were manufactured?

I mean, Pete mentioned in the last episode how people just threw metals into the blast furnace during the Industrial Revolution to see what would happen. Is this what created new possibilities in painting?

Scott Gellatly: All of the above. To give you a good example, if you look at a Titian painting or even a Turner, these paintings look like they're being lit from within. There's a great luminosity there. In the first half of the 19th century was the first time that oil colors were made on an industrial scale.

These concerns that Robert mentioned about increasing the pigment load for paints to remain stable in a tube, and then these colors that came out of the industrial revolution like cadmium, cobalt, and chromium were more opaque by nature. There's a great quote around the impressionists that impressionism couldn't have happened without colors like cobalt blue and oil colors that came out of a tube.

It was both a reflection of the pigments that came out of the Industrial Revolution, colors that were made in a more industrial scale and packed into a tube that really changed how paintings were made in the latter part of the 19th century and on through the 20th century.

Now with the modern organics, we're living at such a rich time to be painters in the sense that we have the traditional earth colors, we have these mineral inorganic colors from the 19th century, plus these high-intensity, transparent, modern colors, and we can really personalize our color palettes based on our individual intention.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, it's so interesting. Something I think that I've never really thought about is how technology, for lack of a better term, has changed painting and mark-making in in general. I mean, at one point, we have access to everything right now, everything that exists, whereas it was so limited before. There's almost like too many choices sometimes.

Scott Gellatly: Right. I mean, ever since cave painting, artists have worked within the confines of their materials. We just have more available to us now than at any painter throughout history.

Antrese Wood: Fun.

Scott Gellatly: It's exciting.

Antrese Wood: It is. It's really exciting. It's like we're in our own little laboratories. The next question comes from Andrea Kaye and Andrea's asking, she currently uses Rembrandt Naples Yellow Deep and she wants to know how Gamblin Naples Yellow compares to that.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah, thank you. I'm going to answer a very simple question with a little bit more of depth because what this brings up to me is that we have a very small palette of colors. 96 colors in our pallet doesn't seem so small, but when you compare it to other manufacturers of oil colors that have 130, 150, 160 colors in it, our palette of colors is pretty small.

Now, within those 96, we're able to cover all the bases, all the important bases, but we have one Naples Yellow and Rembrandt has four. Historically, Naples Yellow, the color is about 160 years old now since it was first developed. It was made in a number of different shades according to the balance of the materials that are in it or the heat at which it was produced.

From the very beginning, it was made in a number of different shades. But in our small palette, I felt that we only had time to put one shade in and it was the shade of Naples Yellow that I thought was personally the most beautiful.

Now comparing our Naples Yellow to Rembrandt's Naples Yellow Deep, Rembrandt's Naples Yellow Deep is warmer and darker and ours is a little lighter and a little bit more yellow. They also make a Naples Yellow Light, which is lighter and cooler than ours. So ours is about in the middle of where their two primary Naples Yellows are.

Both of them are made from three different pigments. The Rembrandt has a Benzimidazolone, another pigment that is a mixture of titanium, chrome, and antimony, and then there's white added to that, and ours is made from cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, and white. They both are a mixture of three different colors.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha. Andrea also asks about Alizarin Crimson. She says, "I've used both Gamblin Alizarin Crimson and Alizarin Crimson Permanent, which are both darker. Why are the Gamblin versions so much cooler? Permanence or toxicity?" She's asking. Then next, are there any plans to mass produce the Smithsonian version of Alizarin Crimson?

Robert Gamblin: We produced Alizarin Crimson for many years before we produced Alizarin Permanent. Our intention was not to produce a different shade of Alizarin Crimson when we brought out the Permanent version, but to give artists clearly that, a much more permanent version of Alizarin Crimson.

Alizarin Crimson is the least light fast color that is left on our palette. It is what's called a lake color 150 years ago. There were many lake colors on the artist's palette and this is the last one that's left on our palette. It just clearly doesn't have the light fastness of everything else that we use.

If you use Alizarin Crimson on a painting and you have it in an interior space, the color's going to last pretty good for quite a long time. But if you put that same painting in a sunny window where light is, sun is falling directly on it for three or four hours a day, then in a relatively short period of time, maybe five to 10 years, you're going to notice a huge change in Alizarin Crimson.

With Alizarin Permanent, since it's made from totally light fast colors, you won't have that issue. Again, we were trying to not produce a different color, just giving the artists who loved our Alizarin Crimson a more permanent version. Both of these are very cool reds, and they are exactly in the shade of Alizarin Crimson that I fell in love with when I was in art school. Alizarin Crimson was my first love, but I've seriously dated many colors since then.

Antrese Wood: So Robert, could you tell me a little bit more about lake colors? What is that? What does that mean for people who don't know?

Robert Gamblin: Okay, the laking process was the system that was developed to be able to turn a dye into a pigment. In oil painting, we can only use pigments. We can't use dyes, because dyes have the ability to move around within a surface. If you've ever had someone put magic markers on a wall and then paint over it and have that marker come up straight through what you've just painted, you've experienced the ability of dyes to move through paint layers.

Antrese Wood: My mother never had that problem. Never had that problem.

Robert Gamblin: You were perfect. Yeah, so we can't use dye. So the laking process was a way of turning a dye into a pigment. They would get this big vat of alumina hydrate that was being made, and they would pour the dye stuff into that vat and the dye would get trapped inside the alumina hydrate. When the alumina hydrate was precipitated out, it would have the color of the dye that would be inside it.

The reason it works so well is because alumina hydrate is an extremely transparent pigment. That leads to the qualities of Alizarin Crimson being so beautifully transparent and having such a glowing transparency.

Antrese Wood: Then the last part of that question from Andrea, do you have any plans to mass produce the Smithsonian version of Alizarin Crimson? I believe you mentioned that in the last episode.

Robert Gamblin: No, we don't, we don't have any plans for that. I think the color that we are making is very, very close to what that color was. There would be no need to do it because it's so close as it is.

Antrese Wood: Just as a follow-up question, Andrea started out asking about the Naples Hue. Two-part question, what exactly is a hue and do you make any other hue colors besides the Naples Yellow Hue?

Robert Gamblin: Okay, the convention of naming a color a hue, such as cadmium red hue, this has been with us for, oh, I'm not quite sure, 50 or 60 years at least. It's a convention that communicates that whatever it says before the word hue is not actually in the tube. If it says cadmium red hue, there's no cadmium red in it.

In the best of circumstances, the company who is making a color this way is doing their best to recreate the properties of the color that is of the cadmium red. They're trying to recreate those properties. This is what we do with three colors, our Naples Yellow, which is in our palette because originally, Naples Yellow was a lead-based color and we do no pigments in lead, but the color is really very valuable so we've made our version of it.

We have Manganese Blue Hue because we lost manganese blue as a pigment in about 1988, and it's never been available since then, and it's extraordinarily beautiful color so we made a very, very successful copy of it, which is our Manganese Blue Hue. Then we also make a Cerulean Blue Hue. That is purely because Cerulean Blue is a beautiful and valuable color, but its cost is so high that we wanted to give painters a lower cost version of it within our artist grade line.

Interestingly, in most places that you're going to find, the use of the hue convention is in student grade color. In our student grade color, we have no hues. We just have no need to feel we have no need to use it there. But essentially, that's what's going on is the hue at best is trying to recreate the properties of the color.

Now, that doesn't always happen. I mean, the worst case of this that I've identified is that there's a manufacturer that has a color named Viridian Hue and the pigment in it is phthalo green. You and Scott were just talking about how crazy is that? They live on two planets. It's like going into a bakery and saying, “I want a cinnamon roll,” and they hand you a Parker House roll. I was like, “Are you kidding me? These two things are not even remotely alike, except for being in the shape of a roll.”

Antrese Wood: Okay. I'm not going to ask you questions about cinnamon rolls and Parker rolls, but I am curious about what makes your student grade paint student grade paints. It's been a while since I've been in school, we won't talk about how long, but I just remember feeling like, “Okay, I'm going to use these as long as I have to and the second I have enough money, I'm changing to the real stuff.”

In my head, I won't touch student grade. I don't really have a strong reason for that other than just this sense that I don't even know what's in that. It's like when you said the hue, what immediately came to my mind was chocolate flavored or coffee flavored. I don't know what that means, so I'm not going to eat it.

Robert Gamblin: Well, the difference between an artist grade and student gradeit is a very good question and I'm glad you asked it because it is not very well understood. When you go into the art supply store, there's absolutely no information there to help you sort through that, what I think is a very important issue.

Making paint at its finest is very expensive. It is expensive for us to do it. It gets to be expensive in the paint aisle. So there's a great need to make color that is not so expensive. We were all students. We all bought student grade paint. Many of us are able to move up when we can as you have.

There also may be a situation where you're in a period of intense experimentation and you're going to make this whole body of work and you have no idea if it's going to be successful and you probably are going to trash it and so you don't want to spend $20 to Cadmiums on that when you can have a nice hot red for $8 or $10.

Many reasons to use student grade color. Purely the difference is this. The most expensive part about making paint, making artist grade color is the pigment. So if you're going to make paint cheaper, you have to take out some of the pigment. So we define making student grade color, which is our 1980 brand, as having exactly 50% of the pigment load of our artist grade color.

We take out half the pigment and in its place is put an extender pigment. An extender pigment is a powder. The paints are made exactly the same, the same kind of equipment made in the same way. The paints end up feeling as they should in terms of having a nice density that an oil color has. There are several extenders that we have access to and so we try to match the quality of the extender to the quality of the pigment that it is replacing.

Some of them are a little bit more opaque, some of them are more transparent, some of them are heavier bodies, some of them are very, very smooth and creamy, we try to match that. So we have as much of that individual pigment quality that we value so much still left in the color. That's essentially a difference.

The cheaper the student grade paint, the less pigment you can expect to find in there. Then they go to more ways of bodying the oil with stabilizers because you can't add extender forever. Eventually you totally destroy the integrity of the color. There are other ways to deal with that, but we don't get into that here.

Antrese Wood: Right, right.

Scott Gellatly: If I could just add one thing to what Rob said, in our 1980 line of colors, we incorporate both mineral and modern colors, so we have both a Cadmium Red Medium and say a Naphthol Red on the modern side. So those differences that we talk about between mineral and modern colors in the artist grade line, those differences are retained in the 1980 colors.

So when beginning painters move from a student grade paint such as 1980 to the artist grade line, we want that to be a seamless transition in terms of the palettes that they work with and what those color names are. With the 1980 colors, we really wanted to give beginning painters the same personality of pigments, a really good feel to the paint, because these are the things that really ensure a successful entry into the world of oil paint.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, I mean, I'm remembering when I was in school, I had zero money to spend on this stuff. It was always the question of, “Do I buy food or do I buy paints?” And of course I bought paints. It was basically just what was available and what I could afford at that time.

The problem that I very distinctly remember having was not really understanding what the differences between the two paints or not really knowing how they were going to react and not knowing “Is this because of the paint or is this because I'm learning and I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm still discovering the properties of paint?”

They became more valuable to me later on once I got that wheel going and then was able to use them now, like Robert said, for experimentation when I know, “Okay, this is probably going to be a throwaway, so I'm just going to have at it with less expensive paints.”

Okay, so our next question comes from Cynthia Yosef, and Cynthia wanted to know, "What's the best medium to use to prevent dead spots on my painting? I sometimes get spots that are really flat and dead looking within the painting."

Scott Gellatly: That's a great question and often painters notice that their oil paintings take on uneven surface quality after the paint is dried and this is because artist pigments absorb the linseed oil binder at various rates. Some colors dry naturally more matte, some colors naturally dry with a bit more gloss to them.

The phenomenon of oil colors drying more matte is often referred to as sinking in. Painting on absorbent grounds such as some acrylic gesso grounds will hold more oil out of the subsequent layers and contribute to this sinking in.

So we feel that the best way to deal with this is a process called oiling out. Oiling out can be done when the surface of the painting is dry to the touch. For this, we recommend a 50/50 mixture of Galkin painting medium and Gamsol. A liberal amount of this medium could be brushed onto the surface of the touch-dry painting and then the excess of it wiped off with a rag.

This leaves a small amount of binder on the surface of the painting, but it's enough to saturate the colors, even out the surface qualities, and in the process of a painting session, better judge the value scheme of the painting. You can do this in between paint layers. You can also do it at the completion of the painting, and this is a really great way to unify the surface prior to varnishing.

I personally think that it's best dealt with through this oiling out process rather than trying to deal with it through the use of a medium. Mediums will change the working properties of the paint by increasing flow and changing the personality in which the brush marks take on.

I think that the painting should dictate how and when painting mediums should be used. If it's an issue of just controlling the surface quality, I think that's best done through oiling out.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha. This is a very selfless question, because I take forever on some of my paintings. Sometimes I get frustrated because parts of it do have a higher gloss and it's harder for me to see the color because it's reflecting back at me. Can you do this oiling out process multiple times within a painting and just keep going on top of it so that you always have that same glossiness for lack of a better term?

Scott Gellatly: Oh, absolutely. The benefit to oiling out a painting more than once throughout the painting's creation is that the more you oil out the painting, the less sinking in will happen because you're continuously reducing the absorbency of the painting structure.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha. This goes into Astrid's question, Astrid asked about the sinking in. What you're saying is that the sinking in happens because of the differences in what's on the canvas.

Scott Gellatly: Correct. From all the way to the ground layers, using an absorbent ground such as acrylic gesso, through using colors that have a bit more absorbency to them, there's a number of things that contribute to sinking in, and oiling out, I think is really the best way to deal with this.

Antrese Wood: Great. This episode is sponsored by Gamblin Artists Colors. I hope you're getting a lot out of this episode with Gamblin. If you're like me, you like to play and experiment as much as you enjoy doing the serious work.

I always have questions about artist materials. It takes me a while to get to know a new color, how it will respond, and there's always these little things I'm not sure about. Like what happens when my paintings dry but I forgot to sign it? How long do I have to wait before I varnish it?

Before I started working with Gamblin on episodes like this one, I wanted to know more about what they're like as a company. So I signed up for their email list to check things out, and their emails were way better than I'd expected, always something useful, and I'm often surprised by what I learn.

Plus, as Savvy Painter listeners told me after the last episode, if you have more questions, Gamblin is perfectly happy to answer them. They called, they wrote, they emailed. Gamblin is exactly the type of company I am happy to send you to because I know they will take good care of you.

So if you're enjoying this episode and you want more, sign up for Gamblin's email list. About once a month, you'll get useful tips and techniques right in your inbox. Plus if you go to gamblincolors.com/bonus, Gamblin will know you've heard this episode and they'll give you a special bonus episode plus transcripts. Yes, there's even more that I'm giving you right now.

By the way, the answer to that question about varnishing after you sign is not so long as I expected. Scott Gellatly covers that one and more in the bonus episode you get when you sign up for their monthly newsletter at gamblincolors.com/bonus. Now back to Scott and Robert.

The next question is from Jamie Luoto. Jamie is saying, "You have a paint called Caucasian Flesh Tone, which you describe as a base color for figure painting less pink than most flesh tones on the market to create bases for other skin types. She goes on to say that painting has been dominated by Caucasian men. She's wondering if you have considered creating other base flesh tones to work from.

Has there ever been a request for an alternative flesh tone to work from? Do you think having Caucasian Flesh Tone as the only named paint to mix other skin types from is perpetuating the exclusion of non-Caucasian art and artists from fair representation in the art world and in museums? Big question.

Robert Gamblin: Jamie, your questions bring up important issues. We have been discussing these issues in recent months in our internal discussions on how to move forward with color for portrait painting.

Now, the ground has shifted dramatically from almost 30 years ago when Caucasian Flesh Tone was first brought out. Then, as now, virtually all flesh tones on the market were simply called flesh. We thought that was an insult to people of color. When we brought ours out, we labeled it Caucasian Flesh Tone.

We got a lot of decent publicity about that in a very positive way that artists made paintings and had shows about the issues, flesh tones, and appropriately naming them. But now times are different and more complicated. We have formulas for skin tones for all shades of people, and we've made them as custom colors for artists, but the demand was never there to put more than one in our line of only 96 colors.

When we do our next expansion, I think we're going to be addressing this, and I'm not actually sure what we're going to do if we're going to be bringing up more base flesh tone colors or eliminating the one that we have. We'll see, we're still talking about it.

But to answer your last question directly, now I don't know how having only one flesh color on our palette affects the art world and the people's ability to break into that structure or not.

But what I do worry about, what I am concerned about is more personal, and that would be a person of color who more and more are painting, coming up to our color chart and looking at our colors, finding the Caucasian Flesh Tone and saying, “What about me? Where's my color?”

Now, the base colors for all skin types are already on the palette. I mean, there's two versions of Sienna, there's two versions of Umber, but they're not labeled for portrait painting. I think that this is a little bit of an issue. They're there, but they're not identified as such.

Also, one of the issues that concerns me about Caucasian Flesh Tone and the problems with its name and that I feel that its name really has limited its use within painters because if you take the name away from them and you just look at the color, you can see that it's part of this whole series of color that deal with warm light.

Most of our paintings, most of the painters that oil painters make, have warm light in them. There's a whole series of colors to help you do that. There's titanium white, which is based on linseed oil, so it's slightly warm in color. We have our warm white, which is very definitely warm in color as a white. We have Naples Yellow Hue that can be used as a white and gives in a very, very yellow light to a painting.

Then there's Caucasian Flesh Tone, which can be used as a white in the painting to give a red light to a painting. There are a few painters who have adopted Caucasian Flesh Tone for landscape painting. Bill Davidson is one of them. He uses it in his mountain scenes and for seascapes. But I think a lot of landscape painters would find this color very valuable and just don't touch it because it says, "Hey, It's Caucasian Flesh Tone.”

Antrese Wood: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me because I've never ever bought any type of flesh tone of any sort. It's not because I have a political problem with it, just because I don't really get why I need that. It may be a difference to me, it is that what you just said. It's like putting out a tree green, I don't really know what that means because there's a million types of trees and the color I need really depends on the surrounding light and what's around it.

So for that reason, I've always looked at the flesh tones and just went, "I don't need that. That seems to be a very specific color for a very specific thing and I don't know that I even will come under the circumstances where I have that lighting situation, etc., etc. So I might be just how I was taught to paint, but I prefer to mix my own." Having said that, though, whenever I can take a shortcut, I will. It's kind of interesting.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah. Our next question deals with exactly these issues.

Antrese Wood: Great segue. Thank you, Rob. Our next question comes from Julie Harman Dovan. Julie is very curious about Caucasian Flesh Tone. Why would somebody use this? Okay, so there we go, exactly. Why would somebody use this? I've always been taught to mix everything from the various colors on my palette. This seems like I would be cheating myself out of the experience of mixing flesh tones as I see them. I would love a convincing answer for me to try this product?

Robert Gamblin: Well, I hate to disappoint you, Julie, but you're not going to get a convincing answer from me. Because Caucasian Flesh Tone, like all mixed colors, are intended as shortcuts. If you are happy mixing all of your colors, then do so. I'm not going to try to dissuade you from that. Color mixing is a fabulous activity.

But I personally find that there's so much color mixing to do that I'm happy to have some shortcuts. I use Radiant Blue for warm colored skies. I use Permanent Green Light as a base to get some warm greens going. I use Sap Green for dark, cool shadows. Mixed colors become not only shortcuts, but they also become known quantities that you can count on.

They are usually not used purely alone. They usually just, “Okay, here's my Radiant Blue, I'm going to add a little bit more Cobalt. I'm going to add a little bit of Prussian to modify that color. Then there I go.” But I've saved myself a tremendous amount of time from putting a lot of white into ultramarine blue in order to produce the same color.

Antrese Wood: The whole process of it is really interesting because part of the reason that I do what I do is because number one, I was taught that way. But number two, I always want to make sure that I'm not doing things by rote and that I'm not just going like, “Okay, sky blue, this is the color that I use for that,” for example. So I'm always trying to really look and go, “What is that color?”

The problem with that is that I'm constantly reinventing the wheel every single painting. I've recently started using your radiant colors. At first, I was like, "What do I do with this? I don't even know what to do with this." Then I started slowly mixing it in, and I'm like, "Oh, that's a great shortcut" for exactly the reason that you just said.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah. The base color or that mixed color that is the shortcut is not the end of the process. That warm sky that I'm talking about, it's even warmer and grayer at the bottom, and it's even cooler and more transparent at the top. That Radiant Blue has to be modified the whole way in order to make that sky look convincing.

Antrese Wood: Very nice. Our next question is from Drew Bailey. Drew says, "First, I want to say I love the show." Thank you, Drew. "I started listening a few months ago. I recently picked up the Gamblin 1980 paint set for when I find the time to start painting. I was very inspired by the last Gamblin Q&A. I was wondering, as someone new to oil painting, what are some common mistakes to avoid in terms of putting together a set of all around colors to paint with and when to move from the student level paint?”

Scott Gellatly: Well, that's a really great question. I certainly hope that you find the time to paint. I would answer this in a couple of different ways. One is I think that there's a mistake in sticking with a palette that perhaps came in a set or was recommended by a teacher for too long.

I've talked to many painters that have stuck with the same kind of impressionist palette that was recommended to them 20 years prior because that was what was on a school class list. They hadn't really thought outside of painting with that palette.

On the other side of the coin, I think painters can get in trouble when they chase too many color recommendations and their palette expands more than what could be a manageable level on their color palette to paint within a painting session.

This brings me to the idea of getting to know yourself as a painter and getting to know your own aesthetics in creating a personalized color palette. The only way to really do this is by painting and getting to know what you like out of painting in general, but also out of your painting.

So my recommendation I think would be to keep things fairly limited. I personally like color palettes that are between six and nine colors. I don't have a palette at any given time. Balancing both the color theory of it, essentially where those colors fall around the perimeter of the color wheel to access your own color mixing potential with any given color palette, then that with what you personally like. What are your aesthetics? I think the only way to really get to know this is through painting.

As to when to graduate from, say, a student grade color to an artist grade color, ultimately it depends on how one paints. I know a lot of successful professional painters who use a lot of student grade color because their mode of painting is through just applying liberal amounts of color on the canvas.

But for painters that want more subtleties in their color mixing potential, more possibilities, then it's time to graduate from a student grade color to an artist grade color. For example, from our 1980 line to our artist grade palette, it's twice the color palette, going from 48 to 96 colors in our artist grade line. So you have more possibilities there with color mixing potential with the artist grade palette.

Antrese Wood: Nice. Our next question comes from Claire Remsberg, and I am so excited to hear your answer for this question, because last time we talked about the different characteristics of whites, Claire is asking about the different characteristics of blacks.

Scott Gellatly: Excellent, and yes, just like we have different characteristics of our whites, our black oil colors also have different characteristics. For this discussion of blacks, I'm going to include both Van Dyke brown and Payne's Grey as they factor importantly into discussion.

So I'm going to start with the most common black, which is Ivory Black. Ivory Black is made from burnt bone, and it's semi-transparent in nature. It has a moderate tinting strength, so it doesn't overwhelm mixtures. Ivory Black, I think, is common because it's a good all-around seem black.

Mars Black on the other hand, which is a synthetic iron oxide is very opaque and like other Mars colors, it has a very strong tinting strength. So it can be a bit more overwhelming in color mixtures because of its strong tinting strength. But Mars Black is really good when you want to use black as a color in your paintings because of its strength.

One of the most unique blacks in our line is a black called Black Spinel. It's actually a cobalt-based black, and it has a very matte appearance, almost like slate. Whereas other blacks cool off in their tints, Black Spinel is really quite neutral.

Then another black that is unique to the Gamblin line is a black called Chromatic Black. One of the things that we found interesting in talking to painters over the years is that for many painters, the use of black out of the tube has been discouraged, maybe by instructors or by other painters.

As an alternative, many painters choose to mix their own blacks. There's a number of really good combinations for this, Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue, Sap Green and Alizarin. Chromatic Black was developed in the spirit of a mixed black. Chromatic Black is made by two modern organic colors that we found to be perfect complements, which are Phthalo Emerald, which is a warm green, and Quinacridone red, which is a cool red.

These two colors, when mixed together, pass right through that middle section of the color wheel to produce a really deep, rich black, which is called Chromatic Black. So no black pigments were harmed in the creation of Chromatic Black. It's a really great mixing color when you want to mix it with other colors, but not muddy up those colors because of its transparency.

It is the blackest or darkest black on the color palette and it's really great for mixing with other transparent colors when you want to create a shade of those transparent colors but not give up their transparency. That's Chromatic Black.

Van Dyke Brown is a very permanent version of a historical color. It is one that we consider to be the warmest black on the palette. Its formula includes some iron oxide in the mix, which contributes to its warmth. Then we have Payne's Grey, which is the coolest black on the palette. Incorporating Van Dyke Brown and Payne's Grey is really important in terms of discussing the temperature bias that these blacks take on.

Antrese Wood: You mentioned that Chromatic Black is a transparent black, and you may have said it, but I didn't catch it, you mentioned Ivory, Mars, Black Spinel, Chromatic Black, Van Dyke Brown, and Payne's Grey. You mentioned Chromatic being very transparent, what are the transparency and opacity values of the other ones?

Scott Gellatly: Okay, so Ivory Black is semi-transparent in nature. Both Mars Black and Black Spinel are both quite opaque. Van Dyke Brown and Payne's Grey are both semi-transparent in nature.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha, fun question. Now I'm going to play with all my blacks. I'm going to have to do a value scale with all of them. I learned that way too. I think that what people are told, it's almost like we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in the conversations about black because I think the intention of people being told not to use black is to really look at what's in the shadows and look at the colors that are actually there and not just assume that colors are black and that gets translated into “never use black.”

Scott Gellatly: Yeah, a conservator, a friend of mine, Ross Merrill, he and I taught a course in impressionist painting techniques many years ago, and we did some pretty in-depth research on impressionist painting, and this is where this “don't use black” idea, I think, came from.

We think we've stumbled on the origin of the idea of “don't use any black.” It was a statement from Monet, where he said, "Black is a death of shadows." But Ross, whose day job was head of conservation at the National Gallery, said that in analyzing Monet's paintings, they found black all over the place. But they just didn't find any in the shadows.

Antrese Wood: That's funny. I hadn't heard that one. Our next question is from Julie. It's a nice segue from that plein air comment.

Julie: I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how many colors I need for a plein air painting. In your opinion, what are the absolute minimum paints that you need to take to paint outside and what would those colors be to get the most out of whatever colors you choose? Thanks for your input. I need your help.

Scott Gellatly: Excellent. Again, I think this is getting to know the different personalities of the colors that we work with. Let's just for this discussion, assume that white is on the palette. I think the best three color palette of primaries would be Hansa Yellow Medium, Quinacridone Red, and Phthalo Blue.

These modern organic pigments will give you the greatest access to clean mixing secondaries. But this might be the best mixing primary, but it might not mean that it's the best for you. I find primarily as a plein air painter that plein air painting and the alla-prima style of plein air painting is really hard to do without some opaque colors in the mix, especially in the lighter values where you want that light to be reflected off of the painting back to the viewer's eye.

This means that having some opaque colors in the yellow, oranges, and reds are incredibly valuable and this is the value of the opacity of cadmium colors. I think it's important to balance again the color theory aspect of it with creating a color palette that speaks to one's personal aesthetics and personal intentions.

My personal palette for plein air painting is based on a six-color split primary palette, so having a warm and cool for each primary color and incorporating both mineral and modern colors. A six-color palette will certainly give painters more access to mixing within color space versus just a three-color primary palette.

My main advice here is to spend some time finding your own color palette, which can really only come through painting and through experimentation. Whether it's a three-color palette, a six-color palette, and nine-color palette, finding a color palette that speaks to you as a painter is really one of the best ways to make painting your own.

Antrese Wood: I think the value of that six-color palette where you've got the warm and the cool of each primary color is super, super valuable for learning how to see and how to mix colors. It can be very frustrating at first, but I think it's well worth the effort to push through that and get to the point where you really can mix just about any red with those primary colors or you can mix anything that you see out there with those primary colors.

To me, it was really fun, but I'm more geeky. I think it can be really frustrating and painful at first, but I would strongly, strongly suggest that you go through that pain because what's on the other side is just total freedom.

Scott Gellatly: Yeah, absolutely. I heard a great friend and instructor say, “There's a lot of pain in painting.” That also means it's a lot of fun, too, to figure out and to sometimes struggle with those color mixtures, because that’s ultimately what makes the color mixing process and painting really rewarding.

There are so many greens and characteristics of greens in the natural world. When you've got, say, two yellows to work with and two blues to work with, that means that you've got a cool yellow or a greenish yellow that is closer to a greenish blue. Those are going to create more vibrant, intense warm greens, for example than say a yellow with more red in it or a blue with more red in it, which will create more muted greens. So, having that split primary palette is a really great way to get to know the color wheel.

Antrese Wood: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I think what I've seen happen to, what it also prevents is this idea that I can't paint today because I'm out of color X. Using the warm-cool primary colors teaches you that, again, it's a shortcut, you can use it if you need to, but you don't have to have that exact color. You can always look at it and go, “Is it warmer, is it cooler? What do I need to do to make that color?” You're not dependent on something pre-made.

Scott Gellatly: Exactly.

Antrese Wood: This is a follow-up on the same topic. This question comes from Stuart Hamby. Stuart is asking, “When creating a palette, what relationship should I look for between the pigments in the two paints? For example, should my orange contain the same red pigment as my red paint and my green the same blue as my blue paint? Same for tints used for lighting. Should my pink contain the same pigment as my red, et cetera? Or should my red, alizarin, violet, blue, green, et cetera, all have unrelated pigments?”

He wants to say that I'm using the word should and of course, it does come down to the artist's choice but I wanted to make an informed choice. I think what he's asking is if my red contains cadmium, do the other colors need to contain cadmium as well, purple for example.

Robert Gamblin: The short answer is no. When a color is reflecting as light back at you, it doesn't know what it is. In other words, just what we talked earlier about Naples Yellow and there are many different ways of using a variety of pigments to recreate a version of Naples Yellow, I think it's more important to put together a palette of colors, as we've been talking about, that just gets you around the color wheel and then put a few colors in there that you very strongly emotionally respond to and then let color mixing take over.

Antrese Wood: Nice. An added question from Stuart would be, “Can you recommend some books on color palettes, historical and modern, that give the characteristics of the actual pigments? For example, light fastness, how they interact, et cetera, et cetera.”

Scott Gellatly: Well, I think the first place to start is actually getting to know the Gamblin Artist’s Grade Color Chart. This organization of mineral and organic colors, modern organic colors, talking about how they interact differently from each other is really an important aspect of getting to know pigments.

Also, on that piece of literature, we talk about the chemical composition of all of the colors, basically which pigment or pigments the color includes, as well as transparency and opacity and light fastness ratings. As an example, one of the demonstrations I give when I'm out presenting to painters is how Cadmium Red Medium and Naphthol Red relate to each other.

Out of the tube, they're very similar. They're both a bright middle red, kind of a fire engine red, but when you add white to both of these reds to create tints, the Cadmium Red, being a mineral color, greys down in its tint to a very natural looking light red, but then when you add white to the Naphthol Red, it's incredibly intense and maintains its intensity in its tint and mixture rather than giving you that like mineral colors.

This organization of these pigments is something that we've really talked about for years and we think it's incredibly important first stop in getting to know the pigments that we work with.

Robert Gamblin: There is one book I'd like to recommend that I think is excellent. I believe it's out of print, so you might have to go to the library to try to find an actual copy of it. It's called The History of Color in Painting by Faber Birren. It's from 1965 but it has hand tipped in plates of color and has just an excellent discussion of how palettes have changed over time and the specific palettes of famous painters.

Antrese Wood: Nice. I hadn't heard of that book. I'm going to go find that one. I was just thinking when we were talking about all the limited palettes and all that, I'm curious, Scott, because I've seen your paintings on Instagram and they're beautiful, I love them, but I'm wondering from your perspective, do you have any secret weapon colors that you use?

Scott Gellatly: First, thank you for that. Yeah, I do. To name a few, I use Portland Cool Grey, Cobalt Teal, Transparent Earth Red, especially for underpainting. The color that Robert uses for skies is Radiant Blue I find useful. To me, it's like atmosphere in a tube. It pushes everything back into pictorial space really well.

Yeah, there are colors that visit my core palette and make special appearances every once in a while. I think it's a great way to freshen up the color mixing experience. Along those lines, we recently added a section to the Experience Color area of our website on our radiant colors.

We featured artists like Lori Putnam and Anna Rose Bain and their use of Radiant Violet, Radiant Turquoise, Radiant Green, to produce some really subtle color mixtures in their work. That's just an example of how other artists use secret weapon colors.

As another example, Wolf Kahn used our transparent orange for great effect as a secret weapon in his paintings. Yes, I have my secret weapons. I think other painters have their secret weapons. To me, it kind of comes back to that issue of finding a color palette that speaks directly to who we are as painters.

Antrese Wood: Perfect, I love it. It's so fun to find those secret weapon, like when you discover one, you're just like, “Oh, my gosh, I get to play.”

Scott Gellatly: Absolutely.

Antrese Wood: So fun. Next question comes from Nancy Zydler.

Nancy Zydler: Hello, my name is Nancy Zydler. I live on board a small sailboat and sail nearly every year to the Arctic where I paint icebergs. I would love to ask Robert Gamblin to describe his journey to Greenland and the processes he used to produce his beautiful series of large iceberg paintings. Did he glaze the ice with layers of transparent paint? Did he use white paint as a glaze? Thank you.

Robert Gamblin: Thank you, Nancy, for asking that question. Nancy also paints icebergs, as you heard in her question, and she gets to take a boat there, and so the boat acts as her studio. When my wife and I went to Ilulissat, Greenland, to visit the icebergs and to draw, we went on a small airplane so there wasn't a lot of art supplies that we could take along with us so we did drawing and photography.

I've been wanting to paint icebergs for several years and so it was really the answer to a dream to be able to go there. I wanted to paint icebergs but unless you go there and see the icebergs, you just end up ripping off somebody else's work by painting an iceberg in someone's photograph so I had to go there and capture the images for myself.

For me, to be able to have a chance to communicate the power of that iceberg landscape, the paintings had to be big. It was only the ability to do studies there. I couldn't really do any painting. All of my iceberg paintings are studio paintings. Some of them get to be quite large for me, which is 40 by 60.

There was a really interesting realization being there. I've been painting landscapes for a number of decades now, and you go out there and there's the sky, there's the land, and fortunately, there's water usually somewhere around, so these very different kinds of elements.

But going there amongst the icebergs, you're in one element, and it was very, very powerful. Scientists say that every element has the ability to exist in three different stages. It can either be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. This is the first time I'd been into a landscape that was just one element, the element of water.

I think water is the only compound that can exist in three different stages like this. So you're on the water and there's the waves, that which is liquid and there's the icebergs, which are these massive solids. Some of the icebergs were as big as a city block. They're absolutely enormous.

Antrese Wood: It's insane.

Robert Gamblin: Then the atmosphere is filled with mist and revealing and concealing the edges of the icebergs. It was totally a phenomenal experience. She also wants to know how did I make the paintings? I literally have pulled every technique out of the basket to be able to paint these things.

So there's impasto, there are glazes, both with white and without white, and then there are scumbles. There's a huge challenge, wonderful challenge, to try to get the icebergs in paint to emit the glow of light they have in real life, and to have the mist be revealing and concealing. Just tremendous to be able to paint them.

Nancy has a website where you can see her work, which is zydler.com. If you want to see my iceberg paintings, they're on my website, RobertGamblinStudio.com. Great deal of fun. I hope to be back someday to be able to do it again.

Antrese Wood: My experience has been with glaciers, not icebergs, but it is definitely on my bucket list. If anyone else is interested in that, Nancy also has a great Instagram page, as does Robert if you want to follow along in her adventure. She lives on the boat, right?

Robert Gamblin: Yes, I think so.

Antrese Wood: Very, very fun. Okay, so you mentioned, this is a nice segue into a question from Jeremiah Palecek. Jeremiah is asking what made me think about it as you mentioned the whites and how you're using that. Jeremiah is asking, "Is there a white that's good for making glazes with? Zinc tends to make everything look chalky, titanium is too opaque. Sometimes I'd like to make a light pink glaze, for instance, but when I add white to something like Quinacridone rose, it dries really chalky and looks yucky. Simply put, what's a good white for glazing?"

Robert Gamblin: There aren't a lot of choices. He's right that titanium is a very poor choice. We have to go to the most transparent of the whites. Zinc white is one option. In our 1980 line, we have developed a transparent white that takes another approach to doing it.

But I think the answer to having successful white in glazes or making purely white glazes is to be very careful about how much of that white is in the painting medium. You need a painting medium. You can't just do it with paint. The medium has to take the particles of pigment and totally spread them out so that you can see clear through them to what's down below.

It's a combination of a medium. I personally feel that Neo Megilp does this very well because being a soft gel that holds everything in place and that doesn't allow things to move around, but using a medium and a very judicious amount of the white, very transparent white should get the job done.

Antrese Wood: The next question comes from Jodi. Jodi's asking, "Do you ever make some of your Torrit Grey colors in actual color? I have a beautiful purple Torrit Grey that I'm using sparingly because it's not in your colors for oil."

Scott Gellatly: We've never incorporated a torqued gray color into our regular artist grey color palette. Having said that, we're always interested in seeing which colors painters find useful in their color mixing and which colors really resonates with them. If you're willing to share, please send us a dry swatch of it.

Antrese Wood: Very cool Okay, so I'll make sure I'll get back with Jody and make sure see if she can do that.

Scott Gellatly: Perfect.

Antrese Wood: So I'm kind of curious, how are transparent earth colors different from ochres, umbers, and siennas.

Robert Gamblin: Okay Let's back up just a little tiny bit because this to me is an important issue. If we were able to pile up all the pigment that's ever been used in oil painting, we would have an enormous pile of white. Then the next largest piles would be piles of the earth pigments.

This shows their importance over our history. But over our history, there's been a huge shift in how earth colors actually perform. Natural earth colors today are not as transparent as they were in classical painting. This is because the earth colors of today are produced for their primary customer, which is the people who color concrete and the people who color stucco.

Those people, those industries want opacity rather than transparency. So over the last hundred years, we have seen earth colors become more and more opaque. They're just not as transparent as they were. If you want to create today a glowing earth color-laden painting like one sees in a ramp brand, one needs much greater transparency than you can get out of today's earth colors.

This is where the transparent earth deliver this transparency. Now, natural earth colors are iron oxides, but they get their relative transparency from the amount of impurities in the form of silica and other materials that are in them. The more the impurities, the more transparent they are.

Transparent earths get their transparency in a very different manner. They get it from their chemical structure. It's just like the color, the very opaque color, Chromium Oxide Green, when that molecule is hydrated, it becomes the beautiful Viridian, more transparent. The same thing is done to an iron oxide, a natural iron oxide, a pure iron oxide, and it becomes hydrated and the transparent earths are created.

Antrese Wood: Another question I have for you guys. Artists struggle a lot with “Oh, my god, I can't believe I'm going to spend $40 on this tube of paint.” Why are cadmium and cobalt colors so expensive and are they really worth it?

Robert Gamblin: Excellent question. Now they are expensive and there are three reasons behind it. Both those families of colors are made from elements in the earth that are very rare and therefore costly. The cadmium comes from cadmium ore, the cobalt comes from cobalt ore, and it costs a whole lot to separate the metal out of that ore. That's the first stage in the food chain that is expensive.

Then the Cadmium Cobalt pigments are formed by taking those individual metals and compounding them, fusing them, at very high heat with other metals. Cobalt blue is compounded with aluminum. Cobalt Green is compound with zinc. Cerulean blue is compounded with tin, and it takes 2,000 degrees for eight or ten hours in order for the fusing of those metals to happen.

Antrese Wood: Wow.

Robert Gamblin: With the cadmium, the fusing is with sulfur, with the yellows, and then the reds are fused with sulfur and selenium. That's at step two in the process, is all that natural gas and all that processing to produce the color contributes to the high cost.

Then the last thing is what happens here in the factory, linseed oil has a tremendous capacity to absorb cobalt pigments and cadmium pigments. What you all have to do is go to your paint box or get one in the aisle of the paint store and just see how heavy that tube weighs. Those are the heaviest tubes in your paint box. That just is a reflection of just how much cadmium and cobalt pigment is present in that tube. Those three steps contribute to the high cost.

Now are they worth it? Well, the answer is yes, if you value the beauty of the color. Yes, if you value the opacity that they can produce. And three, if you can value the permanence. They are the most permanent of colors that we have on our palette. It's a function of that oven.

They're formed under such tremendous stress that once they come on to our palates and onto our paintings, they've got a really sweet, easy life from then on out so there's nothing that's going to influence them to change so they have tremendous permanence.

Antrese Wood: Because we've been talking so much about student grade versus professional grade colors, I remember just going, “If you're in a store and you pick up a cobalt hue versus an actual cobalt color or the same thing with cadmium, it is amazing the difference in weight between same size tubes. It's so funny.”

Robert Gamblin: Exactly, yeah.

Antrese Wood: The last question that I have for this is for Scott. Because, Scott, you mentioned that you're using Transparent Earth Red for your under paintings. That's one of your secret weapons. What are some of the best colors that you find for blocking out a painting in the beginning?

Scott Gellatly: Yeah, it's a great question. One of the reasons I use the Transparent Earth Red is, as a landscape painter, especially up here in the Pacific Northwest where our landscape is dominated by greens and blues, having that warm red underneath gives a nice vibrancy of color interactions by letting some of that Transparent Earth Red come through in the finished painting.

The specific Transparent Earth Red that I use is actually in our line of FastMatte Alkyd oil colors. This is a fast drying oil color palette that we make. We developed it a number of years back in part with underpainting techniques in mind.

If we think back, traditionally, earth colors are used for underpainting, partly because they dry fast due to their iron content, and they dry matte. These are the two characteristics that we put into this line of colors, hence the name "FastMatte." The alkyd resin component of the FastMatte colors enables them to dry in approximately 24 hours, so in the initial stages of the painting, painters can take their paintings further faster.

They're also formulated to dry with kind of a toothy finish, which gives them the matte quality, but that toothy finish also promotes the adhesion of subsequent lighters. So even though I tend to stick with just the Transparent Earth Red, the FastMatte colors have a full 24-color range that includes earth colors, mineral colors, modern colors. This really expands the color possibilities for underpainting techniques.

Antrese Wood: Nice. Robert and Scott, thank you so much. This was so incredibly helpful and I got so much information out of it. Judging by the last episode that I did with you guys, I think other people are going to feel the same way that you're such a wealth of information and I really appreciate you taking all this time to answer all of our questions.

Robert Gamblin: Thank you, Antrese. It's been a real pleasure to be with you again.

Scott Gellatly: Absolutely. It's a great pleasure.

Antrese Wood: Thank you again to Scott Gellatly, Product Manager at Gamblin Artists Colors and founder Robert Gamblin for being so generous with your time and knowledge. If you found this episode useful and if you want more answers to your questions about oil paints, Gamblin and I created a special bonus recording. Go to gamblincolors.com/bonus to get that recording plus transcripts of this episode and occasional emails with even more tips and techniques.

It's a goldmine you guys. The information that they give out is really, really useful. When you sign up for Gamblin's email list, about once a month, you'll get a little goodie in your inbox and right now, you'll get that extra episode plus the transcripts to this episode. It's a lot of great stuff. Again, that's gamblincolors.com/bonus.

If you want to take what you are learning here on the Savvy Painter Podcast even further, join us in Growth Studio. Growth Studio is a unique community of artists. We meet multiple times a week for live coaching, critiques, and demos. Just go to savvypainter.com/join.