A J Ludlow Pyrrole Red Professional Watercolour

Pyrrole Red 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 the watercolour’s properties are exceptional. As with all our fine-art materials, Pyrrole Red watercolour is lovingly handmade in the UK by a skilled artisan from the best ingredients and finest pigments.

Pyrrole 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 Pyrrole 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 synthetic polycyclic organic pigment derived from diketo-pyrrolo-pyrol. The pigment has been selected for its purity, high tinctorial strength, transparency, exceptional light fastness and very attractive, mid-shade red colour. It affords a semi-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 Pyrrole Red Professional Watercolour*.

The Pyrrole 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.

This watercolour has a semi-fluid consistency, and 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.

Pyrrole Red is a bright and intense Professional Watercolour with excellent tinctorial strength. It has a warm red mass tone and affords a smooth graded wash. In this respect when used in colour mixes, it creates a variety of bright secondary colours. When mixed with other transparent watercolours the mass tones of these secondary hues will also be much deeper than those created from the more opaque cadmium reds in the A J Ludlow Professional Watercolour range, thus securing it a special place on the artists’ watercolour palette.

Synthesised by accident in 1974, the potential of the red coloured residue was not fully recognised until Ciba Speciality Chemicals patented a process to manufacture it on an industrial scale in 1983.Although the discovery is a attributed to D G Farnum of Michigan State University, the diketo-pyrrolo-pyrol family of organic pigments were developed later by the Swiss based company, Ciba Speciality Chemicals (Norman, 2007).The lightfastness in the red colour space, was fully utilised in the automotive industry, where it revolutionised the weather-resistant properties of red car finishes, before finding its way onto the artists’ palette. The diketo-pyrrolo-pyrol (DPP) red pigment ( C.I pigment red 254), became known as “Ferrari Red”, as the pigment was quickly incorporated in the famous Italian car maker’s signature automotive finish.

On the artists’ palette, it is often regarded as an alternative to the more opaque cadmium red.

Pigment Details: Diketo-pyrrolo-pyrol / Colour Index Pigment Red 254 ( C.I. PR254)

Footnote:

Norman M, “The story behind Pigment Red 254, nicknamed 'Ferrari Red'”, October 2007, accessed on 22/04/24

https://www.cleveland.com/pdextra/2007/10/pollock_cuts.html

*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).