3 Pigments You Shouldn’t Use (and One You Should)

Peter Conrad
4 min readMar 25, 2022
Green Bice watercolor paint

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…

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Peter Conrad

Peter Conrad is a writer and artist with a penchant for grammar and a knack for the technical. See his latest at patreon.com/stymied or vidriocafe.com