Neutral tint

by Erik · August 26, 2021

To create neutral shadows and to lower the value of many different colors, watercolor painters often use Neutral Tint, the name suggests that the mixture should be neutral, but it is not. Neutral Tint is usually faint purple in hue, the reason for this is the color should also work for yellow colors. When you try to make a yellow color darker with the help of a neutral black, the mixture becomes greenish. For this reason, many manufacturers add a little red and blue color to a black and call the result Neutral Tint.

During the 18th century in England, watercolor painters developed the color mixture called Neutral Tint, it was originally mixed with three colors: A light iron red, light red, a blue in the form of indigo or iron blue and a yellow that was gamboge or yellow ocher (source: Bruce MacEvoy) . Nowadays, virtually all manufacturers use a black color as a base which they add something else to create the violet hue.

A few manufacturers do not use black, I have found Old Holland, Lukas and M. Graham who all make their Neutral Tint without using black. M. Graham uses phthalo green (BS) and quinacridone rose, an interesting use of two complementary colors. Everyone else I have found just takes a black color and makes it slightly violet.

Winsor & Newton use phthalo blue (RS), Quinacridone Rose plus a lot of lamp black for their color, it is the same color mix that they use for the colors Payne’s Gray and indigo, only with slightly different proportions.

Many watercolor painters use Neutral Tint as a replacement for black paint. But the original use was to lower the value of other colors and as a shade color. I myself never use the color, I prefer to mix myself, different color choices require different types of dark colors. It is difficult to use one and the same color for all types of color combinations.

Here are some different manufacturer’s colors that they chose to call Neutral tint, as you can see some are violet-black while others are more reddish (brown) and some are more blue, almost like Paynes Gray.

Neutral tint

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