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Time to get Retro with Chrome Yellow

Date: 07-10-2024
News, Tips & Info

 

 

Yellow is the brightest, lightest colour, and is a key part of colour mixing, being quickly affected by other colours. Yellow almost universally symbolizes sunlight (though our Sun is technically white), and in some cultures, yellow is the colour of royalty, while in others, yellow represents remembrance.


While Chrome Yellow was very popular in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, it is missing from most artists palettes today – why is that, and what does this particular yellow offer us?


With the rise of landscape painting from about 1850, Chrome Yellow provided artists with a surprisingly broad range of greens when mixed with varying degrees of blue. The yellow itself came in various shades, making it especially versatile.


The French Romantic painter, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) made a delicate green for spring foliage from Chrome Yellow with Prussian Blue, Zinc White, and adjusted with a vivid pink made from English Red.


Chrome Yellow’s popularity waned with the development of bright Cadmium pigments towards the end of the 19th Century, and due to the toxicity of the original Chrome pigments. However, nothing else creates such unusual greens, and happily today there are safe replacement colours named Chrome Yellow Hues (the term “hue” denotes a general colour group).


Schmincke have recreated three historic shades of Chrome Yellow in their Norma Professional Oilcolour and Horadam Watercolour ranges using modern, non-toxic pigments.


In Norma Professional, Chrome Yellow Hue Light, Chrome Yellow Hue Medium, and Chrome Yellow Hue Deep are opaque, dense colours that are strong yet somehow earthy hues swinging from banana to Navel orange.


Looking to Delacroix to once again bring forth greens from these unique, fascinating colours, I mixed each of these shades with Prussian Blue, then tinted using Flake White Hue, a warm, fast-drying white that holds good brush lines.

 

 

With a higher proportion of Prussian Blue, the Chrome Yellows produced deep, cool, greens high in chroma. With Chrome Yellow Hue Light, this was turquoise, moving to almost a Cobalt Green with the Middle, and a Chrome Green with the Deep.


Decreasing the Prussian Blue warmed and lightened the mixtures. Chrome Yellow Hue Light remained the coolest, through aquamarine to cinnabar green. Chrome Yellow Hue Medium created a wonderful set of landscape colours, from a deep forest to gold greens. The Chrome Yellow Hue Deep moved quickly away from the dark cool greens into earthy terre verte and golden ochre hues.


The relatively low brilliance of the Chrome Yellow Hues allows them to take on the strong chroma of the Prussian Blue, when the blue is dominant, yet revert to softer greens when the yellow quantity is dominant. While Chrome Yellow Hue has a lower chroma to more modern colours, such as Lemon or Cadmium, it has a very high tinting strength, so can be combined in ever-so-subtle degrees with the vibrant Phthalo Blues and Greens.

 

Chrome Yellow Hue Medium mixes with Prussian Blue to provide strongly opaque landscape greens.


The strong opacity of Chrome Yellow perfectly lends itself to landscape painting, converting the transparent blues into solid greens that cover, allowing easy layering from dark to light, without the need for white.

 

Mixed with Prussian Blue, Chrome Yellow Hue Deep ranges from cold deep tourmaline to gold ochre.

Delacroix’s addition of a vivid pink (a little English Red with plenty of white) will lower the chroma of the mixture, muting it towards grey, as pink (red) is opposite green on the colour wheel. A small amount just takes the brilliance off green, making a more delicate tone.

 

Chrome Yellow Hue Light mixed with Prussian Blue offers a consistently cooler range of greens.


Chrome Yellows are brighter than yellow earth colours, such as ochres, yet more easily tamed than the brilliant modern colours, such as Cadmium, Lemon, and Vanadium.


I was very happy discovering the wonderful versatility of these often-overlooked colours. Like most painters, I’d not explored their unique characteristics, and now I look forward to trying them with other strong blues and greens. I think they will work particularly well with Phthalo Green…


It’s time we returned Chrome Yellow to its place on the landscape painter’s palette. If you’re thinking of spending Spring and Summer composing your favourite vistas, consider adding a Chrome Yellow Hue to your palette. You’ll never look back – unless to check out Delacroix’s greens!

 

painting oil paint chrome yellow yellow landscape painting