"ART is a word which summarizes THE QUALITY OF COMMUNICATION. "
L. Ron Hubbard

Monday, December 09, 2013

Cadmium is very expensive but worth it in some instances.

For some time, since I have been teaching beginning to intermediate art students and wanted to make the process of buying colors less painful, I have omitted cadmium reds and cadmium yellows from my palette. These are traditional colors, made from ground pigments (minerals) and their cost is in part due to the difficulty of obtaining the pigments. But I attended a plein air workshop this fall where the teacher insisted that we have cadmium red medium and cadmium yellow on our palette.

And I found something very interesting. they are opaque colors. Because of this, the visual message that they send to the view is very strong.

If you are painting yellow flowers in a green field and you DON'T have cadmium yellow on your palette, you have to find a work-around to the fact that nearly all yellows are transparent. So if you paint yellow over green, you will find that the yellow is overpowered by the green behind it.

So it may be a good idea to purchase the cadmiums but use sparingly. And, of course, shop around. paints sold in retail art supply stores are often 2 times the price as on line.