From The Vaults: More Winsor and Newton discontinued colours!

So, I went back to my local art shop today and asked if I could have the rest of those discontinued Winsor and Newton Professional Water Colours that I saw yesterday and, could I have them for £1.00 each, per the price they gave me yesterday. The lady on the till had to call the lady I dealt with yesterday, who is evidently more superior, and it was agreed I could have the 5 tubes of Winsor and Newton Professional Water Colour AND 3 tubes of Daler and Rowney Designers' Gouache for £1 each - that gave me a pretty good bargain if you look at current prices - I've marked all discontinued products with an asterisk (*). NB: one of them is another tube of 017 Aurora Yellow that I bought yesterday as I liked the colour and decided I wanted some more.

Daler and Rowney Designers' Gouache
(I've linked the ones I can find on Amazon.co.uk, but I know all 3 are still in circulation based on Daler and Rowney's colour charts)
351 Mint , Series B = £6.31 ["normally permanent"]
533 Mars Red , Series B = £6.31 ["moderately permanent"]
589 Vermilion Red, Series D = £8.31 ["moderately permanent"]

Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolours
(As some of these are in packaging that dates back to 1974, they could well be 42 years old...! As such, some information is missing from the packaging but I have contacted the company and ask them for their help to fill in the blanks)
017 Aurora Yellow*, Series 4 = £8.80 ["A"]
037 Prussian Green*, Series 1 = £5.90 [?]
006 Bright Red*, Series 1 = £5.90 [?]
054 Winsor Emerald, Series 1 = £5.90 [?]
331 Ivory Black, Series 1 = £5.90 ["AA"]

Total value: £53.33 [US$75.33, A$99.76, €66.07, C$97.86]
I paid: £8.00 [US$11.30, A$14.96, €9.91, C$14.68]
SAVING: £45.33 [US$64.03, A$84.79, €56.16, C$83.18]

Not bad huh? Even Lindsay The Frugal Crafter would be pushing it to get such a good bargain and she's amazing at bargains - I wish we had couponing in the UK in the same sense as in the USA - and she's a fantastic watercolourist who is incredibly generous with her time and is one of my favourite YouTube artists and crafters.

So, in terms of giving them a try! I've not touched the gouache yet, nor 017 Aurora Yellow as I did that yesterday so I've just kept the tube as stock. The other colours were interesting when I opened them!

037 Prussian Green, for wont of a better word, was kind of constipated! I could not squeeze anything out but the tube felt soft, not like it had hardened in the tube. I pushed a cocktail stick down the neck and after a lot of squeezing managed to get about 1/3 of the tube into my palette. A quick mist with water and I'm going to let it dry down overnight before I try and test it.

006 Bright Red, this one was actually fine - a little stiffer than is usual but the binder had not separated at all, even after what could have been 42 years sitting around in a tube!

054 Winsor Emerald was much like 017 Aurora Yellow was yesterday - texture was totally fine but there was some binder separation - a stir with a cocktail stick soon sorted that out.

331 Ivory Black felt fine but when I opened the tube there was a lot of gas! It didn't smell bad and there was no separation or setting, it just felt like an air-pocket in the tube to be honest. It had a perfectly good texture, if a little jelly-like and wobbly.

I've left all of them to set overnight before I test them for colour and mixing, as per.

To update the 017 Aurora Yellow I tested yesterday, I can confirm it has dried really well into the palette and the stuff I painted out yesterday has now dried and looks fantastic. I've added some extra pictures to the post from yesterday.

From The Vaults: Winsor and Newton Aurora Yellow

I do love a good deal and I also love discontinued items that have an intrinsic kind of value (not monetary) because of the fact that you're one of few people who has them. I love rare books, I love antique-yet-not-highly-valuable items and I love rare paints too!

I was in my local art shop earlier this week, picking up some Winsor and Newton Professional Water Colour in 637 Terre Verte, 554 Raw Umber, 447 Olive Green and 719 Winsor Green (Blue Shade), and I spotted a colour I'd not seen before - 017 Aurora Yellow. I check Winsor and Newton's website and, sure enough, they don't make it. I emailed them and was pretty shocked to find they stopped manufacturing it back in 1997 because it didn't sell well! Not often you can find 19 year old stock being sold at the same price as new stock - it has an RRP of £8.80 but the shop have 15% off this range so it's £7.48 per tube. I went in today to get some 321 Indanthrene Blue and 190 Cobalt Turquoise and decided to pick up a tube - upon getting to the counter I asked if it was going to be ok, given it was 20 years old. After a bit of bluster, it became a "mistake" that it was on those shelves (kicking myself for not spotting this sooner - I've several tubes in the same packaging that are clearly 15+ years old from the same shop!) and lo and behold it became a mere £1.00 at which point I grabbed the remaining tubes!

I could find out nothing about 017 Aurora Yellow online - the only thing I know for sure is that it is a cadmium-containing pigment as there is a warning label on the tube. Searching The Color of Art Pigment Database, I found it might contain PY35 Cadmium Yellow (Cadmium zinc sulfide) and PY37 Cadmium Yellow (Cadmium sulfide), which, once I got it out of the tube, made perfect sense. Winsor and Newton are kindly checking their database to find out what is in it for me.

The packaging - this is 3 designs ago, so say the folk at Winsor and Newton. It could have been manufactured any time from 1974 to 1995.

The cadmium hazard warning is the text in the box on the left.

So, here it is, squirted into my new Jakar 12 well palette (I needed some more space but something small enough to stand on top of my studio palette until I can justify buying a second one of the latter). You can see the pigment has separated from the binder at some point in the last 20 years.

Here is a close-up of the above using the ×10 macro on my Olloclip 4-in-1 Lens, where you can see the pigment hasn't discoloured, and it hasn't separated too much - nothing a cocktail stick shouldn't fix, right?

Yup, I was right. Looks fine doesn't it? I didn't add any glycerol but if it doesn't dry down well over the coming days, I'll add water and glycerol then try again. So, how does it look?

It's quite a cool yellow but has the opacity and intensity of a cadmium yellow - maybe a cadmium lemon overall? The yellows to the left of it are (top down) Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolour in 016 Aureolin, 347 Lemon Yellow (Nickel Titanate), 108 Cadmium Yellow, 267 New Gamboge, and 319 Indian Yellow. 

Obviously, this is viewed wet but I'll add some photos one it's dry. On the whole, a good fine to get a good, opaque cool yellow for £1 at professional grade!

You can hear a bit more over on my YouTube channel:

UPDATED 10th April 2016

The paint in the palette and on the paper are now both dry so I thought I would add them for comparison purposes:

The paint in the palette has dried perfectly well - it has a few minor "gaps" - they're not cracks per se, and I'm sure it will wet fine for use - I'm going to test this along with my other haul of discontinued watercolours later in the week. 

And here it is painted out using a Number 4 Sable Round onto a scrap of Cotman Hot Press Watercolour Paper. You can get a good idea of the colour and how it looks as a wash. It's like a cooler Cadmium Yellow, in a way.

Watercolour: Cherry Tree

Last night, after painting my colour chart, I was a little bored so wanted to try a paint-spattering method to create a tree. I've seen loads of people do this on YouTube and so on and thought I'd give it a try - all you do is make a fairly strong mix of paint and water and spatter it onto the page then, once dry, paint in the trunk and boughs. Close to my apartment are rows of ornamental cherry trees (Prunus serrulata Lindl.), so I did it in that style, using Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolours in 448 Opera Rose, 502 Permanent Rose, 94 Cadmium Red, 587 Rose Madder Genuine and Winsor and Newton Designers Gouache in 748 Zinc White - each one alone and in mixtures with the others. I then painted in the boughs and trunk in a range of browns - but they're not finished as I need to re-paint them in a cooler brown really. 

It was a lot of fun, but very messy work! The leaves are ok - not perfect - and the trunk (etc) are just placeholders that I need to paint over in a cold brown. I'm going to try doing the same with autumn colours at some point.

Whatever happened to Aurora?

My local art shop has a stock of old Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolours in their old white tubes, and amongst them I saw a colour called "Aurora Yellow" - it's not on their colour charts etc but it can't  be that old (a few years) - the tube that is - so I'm wondering, when did they discontinue it and how does it differ from Cadmium Yellow Light, which contains the same pigment?

Colourchart - Winsor and Newton Gouache

Back in the January sales, I picked up a Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache Primary Colour Paint Set from my local art shop, where it was reduced to about £9.99 I think - a bargain! It contains 6 tubes of 14mL Designer's Gouache (sorry, the name officially is "Designers Gouache" but the lack of apostrophe annoys the hell out of me!) - which is Winsor and Newton's professional-grade gouache - which normally retail for cheaper than watercolours but more than acrylics. They are:

527 Primary Yellow (PY74, PY138) RRP £4.85
524 Primary Red (PR170) RRP £4.85
523 Primary Blue (PB15) RRP £4.85
484 Permanent Green Middle (PY3, PY74, PG7) RRP £5.20
331 Ivory Black (PBk9) RRP £4.85
748 Zinc White (PW5) £4.85
Total RRP: £29.45
Set RRP: £24.50

So that's a nice saving even at the RRP and a lovely saving when you get it for £9.99 (£1.67 per tube).

I had a little play with them and set them into one of my Frisk folding palettes (20 well) (also sold by Reeves and various other companies - it's the same palette, however!) at the time - I added glycerol but they still cracked, though they're perfectly usable. I felt the range was a bit limited so I bought some more colours to add to the mix, as individual tubes:

508 Permanent Yellow Deep (PY65) RRP £4.85
28 Bengal Rose (PR169) RRP £5.20
660 Ultramarine (PB29) RRP £4.85
554 Raw Umber (PY42, PBr7) RRP £4.85
552 Raw Sienna (PY42, PR101, PY65) RRP £4.85

Yellows: PY3 = Hansa Yellow 10G; PY42 = Yellow Iron Oxide; PY65 = Hansa Yellow 65; PY74 = Arylide Yellow 5GX; PY138 = Quinophthalone Yellow.
Reds: PR101 = Synthetic Iron Oxide Red; PR169 = Rhodamine; PR170 = Naphthol Red AS.
Blues: PB15 = Phthalocyanine Blue; PB29 = Ultramarine Blue.
Greens: PG7 = Phthalocyanine Green BS.
Blacks: PBk9 = Bone Black.
Whites: PW5 = Lithopone.

Last night I was a little bored, so I took out my gouache palette and made a colourchart on a sheet from a block of Langton Prestige 14 × 10" cold pressed 100% cotton watercolour paper. I enjoyed mixing the colours and painting (fairly) neat squares. I don't do a full grid, since they're reflective (in that every mix appears twice), so I just paint a triangle. I also added a set of levels using the white and black and a tint of each colour, using the white.

The colours from top to bottom (and left to right) are Primary Yellow, Permanent Yellow Deep, Primary Red, Bengal Rose, Primary Blue, Ultramarine, Permanent Green Middle, Raw Umber and Raw Sienna. The actual single colours without mixing are rightmost on each row of colours - on the "steps" of the triangle. The column of colours to the right are tints and you can just see the levels on the edge to the right.


I really enjoyed putting this together, but as always, the blocked paper buckled a bit. I painted it using a Number 4 Sable. I am really looking forward to using my gouaches a bit more often now that I know the range of beautiful purples and greens they produce - absolutely perfect for botanical paintings!

A little note on Jane Blundell and palettes

I really love Jane Blundell's fabulous blog - even a boring colourchart looks exciting when Jane paints it and I'm going to pinch some of her ideas for my notebooks!

I really love this post in particular on setting up an en plein air palette - something I plan to do now the summer is on the way!

Equipment: Watercolour Brushes

As I've mostly been posting about watercolour work lately, I thought I'd talk about what equipment I use, starting with my brushes. I don't have a vast or extravagant range of brushes - just 14 at the moment. They are almost all student-grade or a bit better - I have one high-end brush, and, whilst I love using it and I can feel the quality when I do so, I don't feel the need to suddenly replace all of my other brushes overnight, but I will slowly be doing so, one brush at a time. I've got a pretty good selection at the moment and they are all dedicated to watercolour-only - I do occasionally use a rigger, spotter or skyflow from my acrylics brushes for watercolour, but these watercolour brushes are dedicated.

Here they are, all laid out ready for use - I'm going to describe them each below, from the left to the right, but before I go into that, I want to go through the different materials that my brushes are made from:

Goat Hair - this comes from the domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus L.) and is used in both natural (white, WG) and black (dyed, BG) forms - I'm not sure why it's dyed to be honest. It's a very springy hair and absorbent - it's particularly good for brushes used in making washes.

Kolinsky Sable - this comes from the Siberian weasel (aka the kolinsky, Mustela sibirica Pallas.) and is a very soft and high-capacity fibre that will hold a lot of pigment and/or water. It also forms a beautiful point for accurate painting.

Pony Hair - this is a cheap and soft hair that has a pretty high capacity for pigment but is very floppy and doesn't stand up too well. Can be mixed with golden taklon (below) to form a pony-synthetic blend (P/S).

Taklon - this is a synthetic polymer and comes in various varieties - white, golden and dark-tip (DTS), in which the ends of the fibre have been treated in some way to hold more water, which makes them suited to watercolouring, whereas golden taklon is better for acrylic.

Squirrel - this comes from various different members of the genus Sciurus L. - they make for a very sharp point and a highly absorbent brush.

From left my brushes are:
Fan blender (Size 4, DTS).
Pointed wash (Size 2, squirrel).
Round wash (Size 26, P/S).
Flat wash (1", P/S).
Flat wash (3/4", P/S).
Flat wash (1/2", P/S).
Flat wash (1/2", DTS).
Oval wash (1/2", P/S).
Round (Size 12, DTS).
Round (Size 8, sable).
Round (Size 6, DTS).
Round (Size 4, sable).
Oval wash (1", WG).
Round mop (1", BG).

In the future, I'll be doing a video showing what I use each of these brushes for and what effects they can produce.