A J Ludlow Cadmium Lemon Yellow Professional Watercolour

Cadmium Lemon Yellow is just one of the bright and exquisite Professional Watercolours from A J Ludlow. Being based on a single pigment with excellent permanence and light fastness, ensures that this watercolour’s properties are exceptional. As with all our fine-art materials, Cadmium Lemon Yellow watercolour is lovingly handmade in the UK by a skilled artisan from the best ingredients and finest pigments.

Cadmium Lemon Yellow 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 Cadmium Lemon Yellow 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 mixed crystal inorganic pigment, cadmium zinc sulphide. This pigment’s crystal is slightly richer in zinc sulphide, which gives the pigment and the resultant watercolour, its strong green shade yellow colour and opacity. It therefore affords an opaque watercolour, which is semi-opaque in thin washes (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 Cadmium Lemon Yellow Professional Watercolour*.

The Cadmium Lemon Yellow 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 fluid consistency and is easily transferred to the watercolour palette. The pigment used in this watercolour is relatively heavy and so has a natural tendency to separate slightly on standing in the jar. If this occurs, just stir the watercolour gently in the jar with a clean palette knife until the watercolour is fully homogeneous again.

Cadmium Lemon Yellow is a bright and intense Professional Watercolour with excellent tinctorial strength, keeping its strong, vibrant colour when applied in diluted washes. With respect to colour “temperature”, it is generally regarded as a cool yellow and often used on the watercolourist’s palette as a cool primary colour (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Examples of different colours obtained with a variety of A J Ludlow Professional Watercolours individually mixed with Cadmium Lemon Yellow.

When mixing with other A J Ludlow Professional Watercolours, Cadmium Lemon Yellow makes a variety of bright secondary colours, as can be seen in figure 2 above. With Phthalo Blue (GS) (a cool blue) and Ultramarine Blue (a warm blue), it is possible to obtain a selection of greens, however with both blue and yellow shade Phthalo Greens, the secondary colours are much brighter. When mixed with Anthraquinone Crimson (a cool red) and Cadmium Red (a warm red), interesting oranges are obtained. With Earth browns (Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber), the mixed colours are still bright.

Although containing cadmium, this metal’s bioavailabilty in the pigment used in our watercolour is very low and so the pigment is considered safe for use in our Professional watercolour range.

Pigment Details: Cadmium Zinc Sulphide / Colour Index Pigment Yellow 35 ( C.I PY35)

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).