Understanding black oil paint

On the colour chart of Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour you’ll find five types of black and all have their own particular properties which offer the painter a variety of options when using black in an artwork. Straight out of the tube, we call this mass tone, you may not instantly notice the differences especially because black is a colour which absorbs all light, but take a closer look and we will see that one may be more matte than the other. When squeezed out of the tube you notice a difference in rheology, or flow. When you scrape the different blacks over a canvas board, making a thin paint film, it reveals an undertone in each black. Let’s take a look at five different blacks, first carbon blacks are Ivory Black and Lamp Black. Carbon blacks are opaque and in oil paint form very slow drying and therefore less suitable for underpainting. Ivory Black, known as PBk9, was the workhorse black for artists, and until the development of Mars Black, it was the best black artists had for oil paint. Ivory Black is one of the darkest blacks and is semi-transparent with a brownish undertone. Because of its moderate tinting strength, it’s a good all-purpose black for mixing and tinting, for example mixing it with yellows for landscape greens, Rembrandt used Ivory Black. Lamp Black, or PBk6, is slow drying and has a blueish undertone. It’s a more opaque colour and stronger in its tinting strength than Ivory Black so better for mixing and tinting. Mars Black, or PBk11, is a neutral fast-drying more opaque black which is cool in its mass tone, with a brownish undertone, making tinting and mixing a little warmer and drying to a very matte finish. Mars Black is the warmest of the five oil colour blacks when used thick or thin, it’s the best black to use as an underpainting colour because of the fast-drying properties. Perylene Black, PBk31, and only developed in 1948, is a pigment with a strong green undertone. It’s a synthetic organic pigment, not carbon or iron oxide based like all the other black pigments, but another derivative of hydrocarbon. Perylene black is slow drying and transparent. Blue Black is a mixture of Ivory Black, PBk9, and Ultramarine which shows clearly in the undertone. Another way to check the undertone is to mix with Zinc White. Why not go experiment yourself and find out which black suits you best. Thanks for watching