A J Ludlow Antwerp Blue Professional Watercolour

Antwerp Blue is just one of the bright and exquisite Professional Watercolours from A J Ludlow. This Special Limited Edition watercolour has excellent permanence and light fastness, ensuring that this watercolour’s properties are exceptional. As with all our fine-art materials, Antwerp Blue watercolour is lovingly handmade in the UK by a skilled artisan from the best ingredients and finest pigments.

Antwerp Blue professional quality watercolour is supplied in a 15ml glass jar, because:

• The watercolour’s wet mass tone can be seen through the walls of the jar;
• The colour can be easily transferred from the jar to the palette with a palette knife.

But more importantly, there is no need for unnecessary additives or formulation changes to make processing in our colour manufacturing workshop easier, allowing the Antwerp Blue watercolour made by A J Ludlow, to be at the highest pigment concentration and the pigment’s unique properties to be uncompromised. Anything less would be at odds with the brilliance and performance demanded of a professional quality watercolour range.

This Professional Watercolour is prepared using the traditional recipe (Mayer 1991, page 37), based on the metal complex pigment, iron hexacyanoferrate and pure aluminium trihydrate. The pigments have been selected for their purity, high tinctorial strength, exceptional transparency, light fastness and very attractive blue colour. It affords a transparent watercolour (as can be seen in the figure 1a below).

Figure 1: Assessment of (a) the opacity/transparency and (b) staining power of A J Ludlow Antwerp Blue Professional Watercolour*.

The Antwerp Blue watercolour does not lift out completely (as can be seen in figure 1b above) and so has a propensity to stain the watercolour paper slightly.

This watercolour has a structured consistency, but is easily transferred from the jar to the watercolour palette using a clean spatula or palette knife. As with all the Professional Watercolours from A J Ludlow, once water is added, this watercolour has excellent flow and is a joy to paint with.

For some artists, the deep intensity of Prussian Blue (which at full strength is almost black), was too strong to use, so Antwerp Blue was formulated to be less intense and more easier to use. By adding alumina hydrate, which is semi transparent in gum Arabic solution, the intensity of the iron hexacyanoferrate pigment is reduce without affecting the watercolour's transparency. Therefore, A J Ludlow Antwerp Blue Professional Watercolour is based on these two traditional pigments.

Pigment Details: Mixed

Mayer, R “The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques”, 5 ^th Ed, Viking, New York, 1991.

Footnote:

*Details of how each watercolour is tested are given in the May 2021 ARTicle “Testing and Assessing the Properties of Watercolours – Part 1 ” (see also Part 2 of the ARTicle, which was published in June 2021).