Comparing Winton and Artists' Oil Colour ranges

In this Masterclass we compare Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colours to Winton Oil Colours. Learn how pigment concentration impacts tint strength and tonal range, helping you choose the right oil paints for your artistic needs.

Video transcript

There’s often speculation over the quality of Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Colour and Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour. I’ve got Dioxazine Purple here, they are both series A, permanent and lightfast. They are both using the same quality pigment but there is just less of it in the Winton Oil paint, demonstrated here by their tinting strength.

So here I’m mixing artists’ quality Titanium White with the Winton Oil Titanium White and you can see there is quite a strong shift in the tint. Then if you add the same amount of Titanium White to the artists’ quality Dioxazine Purple, which is a Winsor Violet, you can see that the shift isn’t as great which shows that you have far more range in your tinting possibilities and fewer limitations. But you can use the Winton as mass tone because the quality of the pigment is the same in both. Of course, if you use Zinc White which is more transparent you can see that there is even less of a colour shift. With the Titanium if you compare the two you can see there is a visible difference from the Titanium to the Zinc. Then the same with the Winton where you’ve got Zinc White altering the shift slightly less that the Titanium so you can really expand your palette using different whites but also recognising you’ll get a greater tinting range with the artists’ quality.