A J Ludlow Yellow Ochre Professional Watercolour

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

Yellow Ochre 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 Yellow Ochre 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 inorganic pigment, ferric oxide hydrate, which gives the watercolour its bright and rich golden 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 Yellow Ochre Professional Watercolour*.

The Yellow Ochre 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 structured consistency, but 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.

Ochres are a family of natural earth pigments containing various amounts of clay, sand and ferric oxide. Since the 1780s, ochres have been processed on an industrial scale to remove the sand and clay and so concentrate the ferric oxide. The process was developed at the ochre mines in Roussillon by the French scientist Jean-Étienne Astier and the resulting iron oxide pigments were exported across Europe and around the world; ochres in their natural state, have not been used as artists’ pigments for a long time.

Pigment Details: Hydrated Iron (III) Oxide / Colour Index Pigment Yellow 42 ( C.I. PY42)

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).