3 Pigments You Shouldn’t Use (and One You Should)
If you’ve taken up watercolors, you’re surely familiar with the popular colors of today: the Cadmium Reds and Yellows; Hooker Green, Sap Green, and Viridian; Cobalt, Cerulean, Prussian Blue, and Ultramarine. There are a few colors you don’t hear much about anymore. Why don’t people use them?
Green Bice (above)
Also called Verditer, meaning green of earth, Green Bice is a pigment made by treating copper nitrate with calcium carbonate. As you can see, the result is a rich blue-green pigment. If it’s ground finely, like the one I bought, Green Bice becomes more of a lush muted green when diluted and applied to the page. Green Bice is a synthetic version of a pigment based on Malachite, a mineral that is mainly a carbonate of copper. Green Bice was widely used in oil paint in Asia and Europe for hundreds of years.
Why you shouldn’t use it: Genuine Green Bice is not very widely available, and maybe for good reason. I ordered some and discovered that it takes a lot of work to get a decent amount of pigment into the brush. It’s a lovely color, but as a guest in a palette of modern pigments it stands out in its stubbornness.
Vermilion
Vermilion was originally also called Cinnabar, another name for the mercury sulfide from which it is made…
