Colours or Stainers.
—We have thus far omitted to take into consideration the colours—or stainers, as most painters call them—that have to be used in the mixtures given in the last chapter, excepting, of course, when a white paint is required.
As a rule, one or several colours are added to the base producing a tint, shade, or hue, as may be required. Sometimes, but not often, colours are employed as “body colours,” that is, they are employed just as they are purchased, ground in oil, excepting that they are thinned down with the requisite quantity of oil and turpentine.
We may now give consideration to actual colour mixture, but must first make one or two points clear, so that the lists which follow may be properly understood.
First, then, it should be said that colours vary in appearance according to the light in which they are viewed. For example, a colour, when looked at in the light of a sunny day in the open, has a very different appearance to that when viewed in a dark room. This will be explained at greater length further on. The mixtures here given refer only to oil colours, and it must be clearly understood that the same results will not be obtained with artists’ water colours. In the case of the latter, tints are obtained by the addition of water just as they are produced in oil colours by the addition of white lead or other white pigment.
In examining the lists which follow the reader may ask why we do not give the actual proportions of the different parts. The answer is that this is impossible for two reasons, the first being that colours vary so largely in quality that the proportions would be useless unless some particular make of colours was taken as a standard, while the second is that the names of the same colour vary also largely. Let us consider this point at once.