d’Arte Board

Used Masking Tape attached to paper

Since I covered patterns, a type of pure form, last week, I thought I’d just go with a color this week.

Last Friday was payday, so I decided to splurge on a pint of Quinacridone Red. Here is Utrecht.com’s representation of Quinacridone Red:

Its a bright red. Of course, your computer monitor works by shining beams of light outward, so bright, luminous colors are common on here. Pigments are an entirely different breed.

In paint, brightness is determined by 2 things:
1- The natural brightness of the pigment. Dioxazine Purple is very dark. Cadmiums are usually very bright.
2- The amount of pigment particles per volume. If you dilute a very bright pigment, it loses brightness. If you just add more medium to change viscocity it doesn’t matter much, but ultimately if the same number of particle have to cover a larger amount of volume, they are going to have less effect.

So because Dioxazine is a dark color if you want it to stand out you have to lighten its Value with white, which effectively makes it brighter. However, because you are diluting it with the neutral white pigments, you’re also technically decreasing its brightness, or Chroma. Given the number of pigments that start dark, or dry darker than they appear in liquid form (hello, Alizarin Crimson), this can get frustrating.

The same action both increases and decreases a color’s brightness. With Alizarin Crimson, or Dioxazine it’s almost always necessary to add white for the color to register, but if add too much you’re diluting it. Given that some of the surface texture effects I use work best when I don’t fully mix the colors, it can be even more of a hassle.

Which brings us back to Quinacridone. While the red you see above may not be overly impressive through your screen, if you catch it on canvas it’s luminosity is striking.

Cadmiums are also bright. And they cause cancer. But they don’t necessarily infect other colors with their brightness. Mix it into something else and it gets diluted. Quinacridone can be diluted, but its brightness shines with an edge to it, whether alone or mixed. It comes in more hues than red, with its purple form possibly being the single prettiest pigment available. But if you mix your own colors, you always prefer to get the primary color because it increases your options. What’s remakable about Quinacridone is if I mix it with the dull Dioxazine and some white, the resulting color is nearly as vibrant as the store bought Quinacridone purple. This is what you see on the flat sheet of color at the top of this post.

In my mind red-purple or purple-red combinations are the “prettiest” color on the color wheel. I can’t even think of another candidate. Its not my favorite color at all. I don’t use it that much (this is the only example I can think of off hand that I featured it in). It’s hard for me to specify the exact definition of “pretty” in this context. A field of orange may engage me, it may feel active, or blue may be meditative, but red-purple just sits there like a beautiful girl with absolutely nothing going on behind the eyes. It is just pretty. But very very much so.

Quinacridone Red-Purple is by far the prettiest girl at the ball.

Because of the volume of paint I use to get texture and volume of different canvases, I usually stick to an Alizarin Crimson-Dioxazine Purple. It’s cheaper. I can buy a pint of each for less than the 25$ Quinacridone. And it’s still very pretty. The Squid piece I linked to above is Alizarin-Dioxazine.

After the jump I will post some more sheets of used masking tape with the Alizarin v. Quinacridone side by side for direct comparison.
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