A J Ludlow Chrome Oxide Green Professional Watercolour

Chrome Oxide Green 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, Chrome Oxide Green watercolour is lovingly handmade in the UK by a skilled artisan from the best ingredients and finest pigments.

Chrome Oxide Green 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 Chrome Oxide Green 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 inorganic metal oxide, chromium (III) oxide, which gives the watercolour its bright and earthy yellowish-green colour excellent light fastness and opacity. It therefore affords an opaque 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 Chrome Oxide Green Professional Watercolour*.

The Chrome Oxide Green 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 using a clean spatula or palette knife.

Chromium (III) oxide is often associated with the military as it is the main pigment used in camouflage painting. In watercolours it is listed by Mayer as a traditional green, along with viridian, green earth and cobalt green**, although it is well known that it is opaque. In thin washes, the A J Ludlow Chrome Oxide Green watercolour is bright and shows good semi-transparency due to the fact that only the pure pigment is used and the degree of pigmentation ensures a strong colour even when heavily diluted.

Pigment Details: Chromium (III) Oxide / Colour Index Pigment Green 17 ( C.I. PG17)

Footnotes:

*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).

**Mayer, R “The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques”, 5th Ed, Viking, New York, 1991, page 136