Know Your Paint Tubes

This is a paint called Red Oxide (scroll to the bottom in mobile-view for pics). It’s also marketed as Venetian Red, but it’s typically the same thing.

I use oil paint from 3 major brands: Michael Harding, Langridge and Windsor Newton. I’ve gotten a couple of oddball ones from other brands too on my travels.

I’d say MH is my fav but I’ve gone with the others when it’s been available in place of the others or economically expedient.

The point is really what’s inside the tube. I respect these brands as they reliably make a quality product I can depend upon and the ingredient mix is super simple to comprehend.

You want to know how to read both the front and back of the label, and understand what it means.

Any paint is a form of pigment molecule and a binder. In order to extend and thin out that paint you will use what is actually properly called the medium, and for me the medium is Linseed Oil.

In this case the pigment is red iron oxide and the binder is linseed oil. The binder and the medium can be the same or be different, and the word “medium” tends to be used interchangeably for both. It’s a nonsensical word-mess until you start painting for ages and ages and it all starts to make more sense.

I match my medium with the binder (both linseed oil) to make it more easy to predict what will happen over time. This is a good way to eliminate potential problems from making bad mixes. You can choose a different medium from the binder, and many people do and make great work and that’s all fine. But the point is you should know something about what exactly you are using. It’ll save you paint, money and problems.

Red iron oxide is literally rust, or the coloured dirt that’s in the ground in many parts of the Australian inland. Australia has very ferric soil, “ferric” being a word used to describe something with iron-related properties. Though when it goes through a paint-making process it’ll still have the impurities removed/minimised. Regardless, the iron oxide pigments are all pretty similar in colour hue and of the same/almost same chemical compound. And cheap and reliable. One thing that’s consistent industry-wide is the “series” classification, although how exactly they price their paints might vary. The higher the series, the more expensive the production/raw materials, and the higher the cost to you the buyer. Red Oxide is Series 1, the cheapest. Across all paint brands, iron-oxide derived paints will all be series 1 or 2. Because Iron Oxide is plentiful, easy to turn into paint and non-toxic (I still don’t suggest you eat it). At the other end of the spectrum (lol), true Cadmium-based paints are expensive: they are harder to procure raw and manufacture, and the toxicity adds regulatory costs the whole way through the supply chain.

Now disclaimer, I was at or near-failure level in high school chemistry and it was my absolute worst subject. I’m not a scientist and not a chemist. I managed to understand this enough to make it work for me, and I’m explaining this to you the reader as a painter and not a scientist

Inorganic synthetic typically means its gone through a lab treatment/production process before being bound to the oil in the tube. Organic tends to mean its simply been dried, ground up and oil added.

Even though organic implies variances permitted (as with organic veg in the market), paintmakers are a big business, and you need to ensure consistency in your product if you want shops to stock it and people to buy it. So even organic pigments have to go through some kind of quality control to make sure what comes out of the tube is how it’s meant to look. This is where brand integrity and reputation become important.

With painting in general, and oil painting in particular, the burden of history is great and affects everything from how people think they should paint to what materials they think they should use. And in turn, the business end of art-supplies knows this and has a strong tendency to lean into the romantic connotations.

Old Helenor-Sue the boomer-retiree wants to paint like the old European masters, (and she won’t, cos she actually wants to paint flowers and farm cottages), and the Venetians sound kinda like that, they were painters right? They’re Europeans? Essentially she wants the notion that she’s channelling historic artistic greatness. so if you call your red “Venetian Red” the thinking is she’ll more likely buy it than if it’s simply called “Red Oxide”. It’s also just historical convention. The pigment name “Venetian Red” has been around for centuries, just as paint-makers have been around for centuries. For all I know, the word “Venice” probably has a longer history in the English language than the word “oxide”. It’s what the industry is used to calling it. Why should it change now?

Nevertheless, this Red Oxide and Venetian Red are the same paint. The only difference is the name. Go to the store and look at the pigment labels for both names across different brands and you’ll see PR101, although the name Venetian Red has also been given to pigment PR102 in a tube for some brands….

…See how this can get muddled and confusing quickly? And this is just oils. The name will crop up across all paint mediums, in markers, coloured pencils, pastels etc etc. When it jumps over to non oil-paint applications its as much about the visual approximation of what everyone essentially agrees Venetian Red is supposed to look like than the chemical composition of that coloured paint/ink itself. If it’s an alcohol-based marker, I really doubt that Iron Oxide is involved. They would be using dyes. Write in to me if I’m wrong.

Then there is “transparent red oxide”, an oil paint which, as the name implies, is transparent. The Red Oxide pictured is not transparent, its opaque.

There’s supposedly an agreed standard for labelling paints (an ATSM) but it isn’t necessarilly always followed to the letter. I can only imagine some of the horrible autistic nerdfights that go on behind closed doors between paint manufacturers, chemical scientists, litigators and everyone in between.

For you as the consumer, what you seek is trust. And to establish trust you might have to road-test a couple of brands. Even if the pigment, binder and opacity are the same. The consistency might be different. Langridge paints tend to be pretty dense from what I’ve found. WN smooth and buttery, MH somewhere in between (and these are all very general and subjective statements, others might say different). But also it helps just to do some heavy reading on the data charts that companies provide (MH usually have printed ones instore, as do WN and a couple of others). Or even just stand in front of the paint shelf and read/compare the back of tubes for hours as I have done. Go home and read up before hastening to a decision, as paint can be expensive. Read forums online, wikis and other articles about the paints. Art instructional books. Michael Wilcox’s books are a very good authority on paint pigments.

Know your product, as they say.

The red carpet and background (excluding the sky) were overlaid with Red Oxide this morning.