A J Ludlow Nickel Titanate Yellow Professional Watercolour

Nickel Titanate 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, Nickel Titanate Yellow watercolour is lovingly handmade in the UK by a skilled artisan from the best ingredients and finest pigments.

Nickel Titanate Yellow professional quality watercolour is supplied in a 15ml glass jar, because:

• The watercolour’s wet mass tone can be seen through the jar wall;
• The colour can be easily transferred from the jar to a watercolour 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 Nickel Titanate Yellow watercolour made by A J Ludlow, to be at the highest pigment concentration and with the pigment’s unique properties 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 complex inorganic pigment, antimony nickel-titanium oxide, which gives the watercolour its green-shade yellow colour and opaqueness. It therefore affords an opaque watercolour, which is semi-opaque in thin washes (as can be seen in figure 1a below).

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

The staining power of Nickel Titanium Yellow is on the low side and so the watercolour is easily lifted out (see figure 1b above).

The pigment used in this watercolour is relatively heavy and so Nickel Titanate Yellow Professional Watercolour has a natural tendency to settle on standing. If settlement occurs, just stir the watercolour gently in the jar with a clean palette knife until the watercolour is fully homogeneous again.

Although a muted colour (even to the point of being considered dull by some), Nickel Titanate Yellow is used to create dark flesh tones and some artists find it a very useful light yellow for inclusion in an “earth” palette.

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

Although the pigment’s tinctorial strength is low, the watercolour’s lemon-yellow hue produces attractive pastel mixes with violets and greens; with raw umber it produces a pastel brown (some examples of colour mixes with Nickel Titanium Yellow are shown in Figure 2 above).

Other names for artists' colours based on this pigment include Primrose Yellow, Sun Yellow, Titan Yellow and Nickel Rutile Yellow.

Although containing antimony and nickel, these metals’ 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: Antimony Nickel-Titanium Oxide / Colour Index Pigment Yellow 53 ( C.I. PY53)

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 this ARTicle, which was published in June 2021).