Professional Oil Colour

Oil

PROFESSIONAL OIL COLOUR

Langridge Professional Oil Colour is a high performance professional artists’ grade oil paint developed to excel in saturation of colour and physical handling qualities. Hand-made at our Melbourne factory, they look and feel different because they are different.

Our paint is made by triple-roll mill in batches no larger than 20 litres, which allows us total control throughout production. Multiple passes of the paint through the mill creates a paint with the strongest ‘colour-development’ possible. The paints are repeatedly run on the triple roll mill at ever finer grinds to fully disperse the individual particles of pigment in the lowest possible quantity of drying oil ensuring the most pure, bright and saturated artists' paints available. Inorganic colours are passed through the mill a minimum of 3 times, organic colours are passed through the mill up to 7 times before we consider them ready. We grind our paints more times than other manufacturers, because we do not use additives, such as stearates or waxes that, whilst making paint easier to grind, reduce pigment loading and the structural integrity of the paint. Langridge oil paints are highly intense, enabling artists to extend the paint, if desired, and to facilitate exceptional clean mixes when blended together.

All our colours are made without modifiers, opacifiers, fillers and anything that may interfere with the clarity and true brightness of the pigment. Langridge oil paints include a stabilizer of fumed silica that has been added in extremely minimal quantities and does not diminish the individual effects of pigments in oil. Its inclusion in the formulation is to prevent over-hardening of certain colours such as the cadmiums or excessive oil/pigment separation in-tube over extended periods of storage.

Adulterants and modifiers are well known by conservation scientists to dramatically weaken the paint film’s integrity. Artists can be confident that Langridge Professional Oil Colours will age with the minimum possible alteration in colour, flexibilty or adhesion.

Because the colours have not been adulterated the true individual nature of each pigment has not been masked. Some colours, such as the oxides will be soft and brush out easily whilst modern organic phthalos will be stiff. Other colours may be buttery, slippery, sticky or clotted.

The resulting range of paints has the fullest chromatic strength, intense tinting power, excellent lightfastness qualities and extremely clean colour-mixing potential on the palette.


Titanium White	Titanium-Zinc White	Zinc White	Unbleached Titanium

Zinc Yellow	Titanate Yellow	Cadmium Yellow	Arylide Yellow	Cadmium Yellow Deep	Cadmium Orange

Cadmium Red Light	Naphthol Red	Cadmium Red	Brilliant Pink	Perylene Crimson

Quinacridone Magenta	Dioxazine Violet	Manganese Violet

Ultramarine Blue	Phthalo Blue	Cobalt Blue	Cerulean Blue	Zinc Blue	Cobalt Teal

Phthalo Green	Cadmium Green	Chromium Oxide

Yellow Oxide	Raw Sienna	Gold Oxide	Mars Orange	Red Oxide	Burnt Sienna	Caput Mortuum

Raw Umber	Mars Brown	Burnt Umber	Cold Brown Oxide	Titanium Grey	Mars Black

Manufactured in the Langridge factory they are painstakingly blended, mixed and triple-roll milled to obtain a paint with the highest pigment loading and strongest colour development.

Prior to running through the triple-roll mill, the pigment is fully dispersed with the oil into a stable paste, known as the 'millbase'. The material is mixed in planetary or high-speed mixers for extended times to ensure the pigments are well coated in the oil. The millbase is then left to rest for a period of time to allow for the incorporation of more pigment often not attainable in the initial dispersing process.

Artists oil colours are made primarily of two components:
1. Pigment. These are fine particles of colour. In themselves they have no way of holding onto a surface and must be bound in a vehicle.
2. Oil. Drying oils are the vehicle or binder that hold the pigment together to make the paint and allow it to stick to the surface.

The relationship between pigment and oil is critical. Enough oil must be available within the paint to properly coat and bind the pigment particles. Too much oil will lead to low colour strength, excessive yellowing and livering of the paint film. Most artist's paint on the market is made with many modifiers to make it easier for the manufacturer to produce. Strength of colour is reduced and long term stability can be compromised as modifiers are introduced to the basic structure.

For every one percent of pigment that is added to the formula it is considerably much harder to fully disperse as there is less oil to coat it. At Langridge, as we attempted to raise the pigment loading to the levels we knew were achievable but not attempted by our competitors we had to find our own methods of increasing the pigment to create a paint with the strongest and most intense colour available in the world.

We introduced production processes that have further increased the pigment load and improved the paints' rich texture. In certain colours, essential with many of the synthetic organic pigments, the incorporation of high performance dispersing aids have been used in the lowest possible dosage to help the take-up of higher pigment loadings and better full dispersion within the finished paint.

This dedication to the true qualites of oil paint, allied to historical understanding and contemporary innovation, we believe, makes Langridge Professional Oil Colours the finest, most unique oil paints available in the world today.

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