Since 1832 when Henry Newton and William Winsor introduced the first moist water colours to the world, much of our reputation for supreme quality has stemmed from the Artists' Water Colour range.

Since then Artists' Water Colour continues to be formulated and manufactured according to our founding principles; to create an unparalleled water colour range which offers artists the widest and most balanced choice of pigments with the greatest possible permanence.

Each colour within this wide and balanced spectrum of 96 colours, has been selected and formulated to offer the greatest choice so that artists can use a unique palette that best suits their work. 

Formulation

In simple terms, a water colour is produced by combining (or suspending) a pigment with a binder, for example, Gum Kordofan, a type of Gum Arabic (To find out more about Binders go to Further Information.)

The formulations for our Artists' Water Colours are each unique and vary according to the nature and behaviour of each individual pigment.

With this in mind, and with a range which has thousands of different applications by millions of artists worldwide, we rely on expert chemists who have spent their working lifetimes understanding and formulating Artists' Water Colour.

In fact, these chemists have learned from the chemists before them who also spent their working lives at Winsor & Newton - since William Winsor died in 1865 we have only had four chief chemists! Thanks to their experience and expert knowledge, we can continue to formulate the highest quality range with the widest choice of colours, using the largest number of pigments.

 

Pigments

Pigment Choice 
Water colour more than any other medium relies upon the variable characteristics of the pigments used. As it is essentially a staining technique, everything rests on the handling properties of the pigments; whether they can produce a smooth wash or a textured wash; how opaque or transparent they are; the brilliance and strength of their colour; and so on.

With this in mind, it has always been - and will continue to be - our aim to provide artists with the widest possible range of pigments to give them the greatest choice and flexibility. It takes a total of 87 different pigments to produce the 96 Artists’ Water Colours.

The world’s industries have also multiplied during the history of Winsor & Newton, leading to the continual development of new pigments. Plastics, ceramics, aviation and car industries have also needed stable, bright, dense colours and this has been wonderful news for artists.

Today, our Artists’ Water Colours contain an ever-widening range of high performance pigments, which ensure strength of colour and excellent brilliance combined with extremely high permanence ratings.

Single Pigments in the Range Just like people, each and every pigment differs in shape, size, colour, and “personality”. Pigments, especially in water colour, serve as a set of tools or vocabulary to help artists manipulate their work and alter their expression.

Blue area of the spectrum showing different single pigment characteristics.

Wherever possible, single pigments have been used in Artists’ Water Colour to ensure that we offer the widest choice of colours and pigment characteristics or positions, such as hue, particle size, transparency, tinting strength, etc. This helps broaden the artist’s creative expression.   

We use single pigments wherever possible. Single pigment formulations are purer in hue and cleaner in colour than mixtures of pigments, providing a larger number of colour mixes before resulting in muddy effects. Within the new Artists’ Water Colour range there are 75 single pigments amounting to 78% of the range.

The unique hue of Cobalt Violet (A) cannot be matched by a mixture of pigments (B)

Mixed Pigments Although mixed pigments inevitably lose some degree of chroma or brightness, there are many reasons why we still choose to formulate with them. In some instances, we can achieve a higher level of permanence over a single pigment alternative, e.g., Permanent Alizarin Crimson and Hookers Green.

In other instances, some pigments have to be mixed to achieve a given formulation. For example, Quinacridone Gold where the pigment itself is no longer available.

 

For more information on Types of Pigments in Artists' Water Colour, Pigment Family Groups and the History of Pigments see our Pigments in Water Colour section.

Transparency & Opacity Our Artists’ Water Colours exhibit unrivalled transparency due to the unique pigment dispersion in the manufacture of the colour. This is particularly important because transparency is the key characteristic of water colour. As a result of the thinness of the water colour film, all colours have a transparent quality on paper, allowing the reflective white of the paper to shine through. However, pigments do retain their natural characteristics to some degree. For example, transparent pigments refract light in much the same manner as stained glass, making jewel-like brilliance and clean mixing. Opaque colours such as cadmiums are likely to cover significantly more than transparent colours. 

The varying transparency and opacity of a pigment will affect the optical character of the individual colour as well as how the colour mixes with other colours. The most transparent colours will enable you to create a pure glazing effect by applying a number of washes on top of one another. The more opaque colours give flatter washes and greater covering over previous washes. Opaque colours are also useful for toning down colour mixtures.

On the Winsor & Newton Artists’ Water Colour chart, the transparent colours are marked with  or T, the semi-transparent colours are marked  or ST. The relatively semiopaque colours are marked with  or SO and the opaque colours are marked with  or O.