Gamblin 1980 Oils - PY37-Cadmium Yellow; PG18-Viridian

Gamblin’s approach is different. 1980 colours contain pure pigments, the finest refined linseed oil, and marble dust (calcium carbonate). Since oil painting began, these three ingredients have made more affordable colours.

Painters experience true colours without homogenized texture or muddy colour mixtures. Gamblin's approach of using both traditional raw materials and processes ensures that artists experience the luscious working properties that they expect from their oil colours.

Cadmium Green: A bright, light green mixture of Viridian and Cadmium Yellow. It is opaque and helpful to make muted colours of the natural world. No health labelling is required.

PIGMENT COMPOSITION AND PERMANENCE

• Pigment Name: PY37-Cadmium Yellow (Concentrated cadmium zinc (II)-sulphide)
• Pigment Type: inorganic, cadmium

PROPERTIES

Cadmium Yellow is brilliant, dense, and opaque, with good tinting strength and high hiding power. It is the artist’s principal bright yellow and is available in light, medium, and dark shades. The deeper shades appear deep orange and have the greatest tinting strength.

It is slow-drying in oil and used in oil and watercolour. It cannot be mixed with copper-based pigments. A clean Cadmium Orange is created when Cadmium Yellow is mixed with Cadmium Red. Hues vary by brand.

Cadmium pigments have been partially replaced by azo pigments, similar in lightfastness to the cadmium colours, cheaper, and non-toxic. Cadmium Yellow is usually available in a pure grade or a cadmium-barium mix. This mix has the same permanence with a lower tinting strength.

PERMANENCE

Cadmium Yellow is lightfast and permanent in most forms, but like most cadmium colours, it will fade in fresco or mural painting. The deeper shades are the most permanent. The pale varieties have been known to fade with exposure to sunlight.

TOXICITY

Cadmium Yellow is a known human carcinogen. It can be hazardous if chronically inhaled or ingested.

HISTORY

Cadmiums get their names from the Latin word cadmia, meaning zinc ore calamine, and the Greek word kadmeia, meaning Cadmean earth, first found near Thebes, the city founded by the Phoenician prince Cadmus.

Friedrich Strohmeyer discovered metallic cadmium in 1817. Oil colours were first made from Cadmium Yellow pigments in 1819, replacing toxic Chrome (lead) Yellows. However, due to the scarcity of cadmium metals, their production was delayed until 1840.

Landscape painters, such as Claude Monet, preferred Cadmium Yellow to the less expensive Chrome Yellow because of its higher chroma and greater purity of colour.

PIGMENT COMPOSITION AND PERMANENCE

• Pigment Name: PG18-Viridian (chromium (III)-oxide hydrate)
• Pigment Type: inorganic

PROPERTIES

Viridian is the standard green. It is stable, robust, and cold, with an emerald green undertone. It has a transparent hue, good tinting strength, a dark masstone that can be almost black at full power, and a slow drying time in oil form.

Viridian is commonly replaced by the darker, more saturated, and staining Phthalo Greens, but its properties make it a necessary part of the palette of an experienced landscape painter.

PERMANENCE

Viridian has excellent permanence, except in high-temperature work, and is highly valued as a glazing colour.

TOXICITY

Viridian is slightly toxic.

HISTORY

Viridian's name comes from the Latin viridis, meaning green. Guignet patented the process for manufacturing Viridian, or Transparent Oxide of Chromium, in Paris in 1859. However, Pannetier and Binet discovered it in 1838.

Viridian replaced Verdigris, which was reactive and unstable, and Emerald Green, which was a poisonous copper aceto-arsenite used as a rat poison in the sewers of Paris.