A J Ludlow Cadmium Red Professional Watercolour

Cadmium Red 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 Red watercolour is lovingly handmade in the UK by a skilled artisan from the best ingredients and finest pigments.

Cadmium Red 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 Red 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 sulphoselenide (sulphide selenide), which gives the watercolour its bright and clean mid-shade red colour and opacity. It therefore affords an opaque watercolour, which is semi-transparent 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 Red Professional Watercolour*.

The Cadmium Red 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 Red is a bright and intense Professional Watercolour with excellent tinctorial strength, keeping its strong, vibrant colour when applied in diluted washes. As with all the cadmium colours in the A J Ludlow watercolour range, Cadmium Red is bright and shows a good degree of transparency in thin washes, due to the fact that only the pure pigment is used and the degree of pigmentation ensures a strong colour even when heavily diluted. It can be used on the artist’s palette as a brilliant mid-shade red or warm primary red, which can be mixed with yellows to create warm oranges and with blues to give a selection of purples.

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 Sulphoselenide / Colour Index Pigment Red 108 ( C.I. PR108)

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).