Contemporary knowledge dedicated to the making of traditional materials. Beautiful, high quality, bright paint.
 
Gamblin 1980 Oil Colors are made with the same dedication and pure pigments that go into our Artist's Oils. In addition, we use the same process of mixing, milling, filling, and hand labelling.
 
In order to reduce the cost of oil colours, some manufacturers use gels and wax to stiffen colours and replace traditional pigments with less expensive ones. Our approach is different. 1980 colours are formulated with pure pigments, the finest refined linseed oil and marble dust (calcium carbonate). More affordable colours have been made with these three ingredients since oil painting began. With 1980 colours, artists experience colours that are true, without homogenized texture or muddy colour mixtures.
 
Our approach of using both traditional raw materials and processes ensures that artists experience the luscious working properties that they expect from their oil colours. The chart below lists the pigments used in our 1980 colours and their relative opacity and transparency.
 
About 1980 Oil Colors = Best Student Grade Value
True colour. Real value.
 
Gamblin 1980 Oil Colors are made with the same dedication and pure pigments that go into our Artist’s Oils. In addition, we use the same process of mixing, milling, filling, and hand labelling.
 
In order to reduce the cost of oil colours, some manufacturers use gels and wax to stiffen colours and replace traditional pigments with less expensive ones.
 
Our approach is different. 1980 colours are formulated with pure pigments, the finest refined linseed oil and marble dust (calcium carbonate). More affordable colours have been made with these three ingredients since oil painting began.
 
With 1980 colours, artists experience colours that are true, without homogenized texture or muddy colour mixtures. Our approach of using both traditional raw materials and processes ensures that artists experience the luscious working properties that they expect from their oil colours.
 
Yellows
The colour yellow appears to advance. It has the highest reflectivity of any colour.
 
Today hearing “yellow” many painters will think of Cadmium Yellow – brilliant and opaque. Cadmium Yellow replaced toxic Chrome (lead) Yellows. Although more expensive than Chrome Yellow, Cadmium Yellow was used by landscape painters, including Claude Monet, because of its higher chroma and its greater purity of colour.
 
Painters today can choose from among the cadmium yellows of the impressionists as well as the modern and more transparent Hansa yellows. Hansa yellows retain their intensity in tints and make beautiful glazes.
 
Hansa Yellows can boost cadmium in mixes; enabling brighter secondaries. Indian Yellow has been prized for hundreds of years and is ideally suited for glazing. In its transparency, it makes a glowing warm yellow—as if a painting were suddenly lit with summer sunshine.
 
Before the Industrial Revolution, painters used Yellow Ochres or Orpiment (sulphide of arsenic). Occasionally painters found some Gamboge, a strongly coloured secretion from trees that resembles amber. Gamboge was used for glazing before Indian Yellow became available in the middle of the 19th century. 
 
To make Indian Yellow, cows were force-fed mango leaves and given no water. Their urine was collected in dirt balls and sold as “pigment.” The resulting artists’ colour was a warm transparent glazing yellow. But Indian Yellow was lost somewhere between the decline of cruelty to animals and the rise of manufactured pigments.
 
In the 20th century, the most transparent of the yellows that we at Gamblin call “Indian Yellow” is a light stable diarylide pigment. In its transparency, it makes a glowing warm yellow—as if a painting were suddenly lit with summer sunshine.
A colour with obscure origins, Naples Yellow was originally lead antimoniate. Assyrian artists used this pigment to make the ceramic glaze. Contemporary history of this colour begins in the 18th century but “Naples Yellow” means more colour than a chemical composition. Rubens used this colour extensively for skin tones. Because the original pigment is lead-based, Robert Gamblin formulated an excellent copy at a reasonable price.
 
Hansa yellow pigments were first made in Germany just before World War I. They are organic pigments that are semi-transparent and lightfast (Hansa Yellow Light is Lightfastness II, and Hansa Yellow Medium & Deep are Lightfastness I).
 
In their mass tones, Hansa Yellows resemble Cadmium Yellows but the similarity ends there. Hansa Yellows make more intense tints and cleaner secondaries, especially when mixed with other organic (modern) colours like Phthalo Blue and Green.
 
Because they are more transparent, Hansa Yellows have great value as glazing colours. Painters can also take advantage of the “temperature” shifts of the Hansas –- from coolest yellow (Hansa Yellow Light) to warm golden yellow (Hansa Yellow Deep).
 
Oranges
When deepened, orange – unlike red and yellow – becomes brighter instead of darker. Few colourants produce pure orange. During the Middle Ages, orange mineral provided a rich, opaque pigment for easel painting and illuminated manuscripts.
 
Near the end of the 18th century, the emerging commercial paint industry developed synthetic iron oxides, “Mars Colors,” which made more predictable colours than natural earth pigments. Used for colour consistency and opacity, Mars colours range from orange to dark red/purple.
 
Today, painters have several orange options. Painters like Wolf Kahn reach for Gamblin Transparent Orange, a warm colour unique to the Gamblin palette.
 
Orange is the colour of safety: orange life vests are easily seen on dark and stormy seas. Always a warm advancing colour, orange is the forerunner of the sun.