I'm looking for pure gouache (poster) colours - not hues! - of red, yellow & blue.?

Question

I'm looking for pure gouache (poster) colours - not hues! - of red, yellow & blue, with pure pigments that will give clean mixtures of orange, green & purple. They don't necessarily need to be made by same brand. Can anyone recommend? Where can they be obtained?

Answer 1

A lot of companies make gouache - Winsor & Newton. Lukas, Pelikan, to name a few. I'm sure you can buy it at any reputable art supplies store, if not online.

Unfortunately, CMYK technology doesn't fly when you're mixing pigments. For instance, primary Magenta and Yellow do NOT make a very nice orange - there is too much blue in magenta.

Realistically, there are very few paint pigments that will mix to both warm and cool, and you will likely end up needing 2 yellows, 2 reds and 2 blues.

To mix orange, you need a warm yellow (anything but lemon) and a warm red (toward the yellow/orange range, like cadmium red medium or light). And to mix a good purple, you need a cool red (purplish, not orange, like carmine or alizarin) and a warm blue (purplish, not greenish - ultramarine). Then to mix a green, you'll need a cool yellow (lemon) and a cool blue (cobalt).

Those colours I've given are traditional pigments, and expect to pay much more (double at least) for them. But you can replace cadmium with naphthaline or pyrrole, carmine/alizarin with quinachridone, and cobalt or ultramarine with phthalocyanine.

What's more important is you need to look on the label for one single pigment (pure) as opposed to two or more pigments (hue), bearing in mind that gouache traditionally has Titanium white added for opacity. The manufacturers of artist-quality paint always list the pigments. You can go online to the company site and find out this info if you're buying online.

Happy painting

Answer 2

You should be able to get a pack at the art store. Cyan, magenta, and yellow produce true colors...I know those are the colors gouache usually come in. Play around with them. You'll get the color you need! Check a CMYK color chart and you'll get the correct color ratios.