Painting With Opaque Colors
Lisa Pressman, Inside Out, 30" x 30", encaustic on panel.
When you begin painting, you soon discover some pigments have better covering power than others. For example, Titanium White masks underlying color and mark-making, whereas Indian Yellow dries translucent, allowing you to peer through to the layer underneath. This discovery provides artists with a valuable tool for creating push and pull within color and imagery. It can be used to represent depth, illusion, feeling, and so much more in a painting.
In Lisa Pressman's painting above, opaque colors are placed at the center of the painting. The dark translucent blue on the edges is pushed deep into the background, and the warm opaque colors move forward into the foreground.
Why do some pigments have better covering power than others?
Some colors are opaque while others are translucent. Opaque colors tend to be brighter and have a greater ability to hide underlying color and mark making. Translucent colors tend to be deeper and reveal the layer under it.
The pigments of opaque colors have a greater ability to bend incoming light and thus scatter it, keeping the light from penetrating through to the underlayer. It’s similar to looking at the glare from the light of an oncoming car at night, which keeps you from seeing the car itself. That scattering both hides and makes the color brighter.
Translucent pigments bend incoming light less than opaque pigments do, so they scatter the light less and some of it transmits through to the underlayer. Again, going back to the analogy of an oncoming car’s headlights, think of how much more of the car you see when its lights are on the low beam rather than the high beam.
Opaque colors tend to be brighter because the scattering represents a greater reflection of light; whereas, translucent colors absorb more of the light when transmitting it through and therefore reflect less light, which makes the color appear deeper. You can see this when comparing Cobalt Blue with Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow Deep. with Indian Yellow, or Cadmium Red Deep. with Quinacridone Red.
More information about the opacity of our colors can be seen on our complete color chart - here. To see a list of our opaque colors, separated by color line, click on the links below.
Click here to download our list of opaque Pigment Stick® colors.
Click here to download our list of opaque encaustic colors.