Pigment Exploration: PO107 Transparent Orange

Greetings! In my ongoing quest to find a new red-orange or orange-red, I recently played with Transparent Orange by Winsor and Newton. A wonderful friend sent me a generous sample from her own collection for me to test the pigment out. Let’s have a little look at its properties, colour mixing with some of my favourite pigments, and a test painting. Hopefully that gives us a rounded view of this pigment in action!

Pigment properties

• Lightfastness: Excellent

• Transparency: Transparent

• Staining: N/A (see below)

Winsor and Newton doesn’t provide information on how staining or lifting Transparent Orange is. Based on information from friends, people experience it as either low-staining or non-staining. I did my own test to determine how it acts on one of the papers I use frequently (Saunders Waterford cold press). The middle square in a column of three on the mixing chart below shows the lifting test. I did two rounds of lightly scrubbing the paper and pressing with a tissue. Compare it to the glazing test in the top square to get a feel for how the paint behaves.

The test in the bottom-left corner shows three blobs of paint dropped into a rectangle of very wet paper. I then tilted the sheet around to see how the pigment moved with the water. I found it to be a nice balance of movement and control. Even when painting a full illustration, there was a balance of how much it moved on its own with water and being able to control the movement myself. It didn’t sit still entirely, but it didn’t whoosh all over the place either.

A pigment properties and colour mixing chart for Transparent Orange PO107 by Winsor and Newton.

The above chart is a slightly lower resolution version of the scan to work well in a blog post format. You can see the full resolution version of the chart for free here.

Colour mixing with Transparent Orange

For the colour mixing section of the test chart I used my favourite method. Starting with one pigment and gradually adding in the pigment I’m testing, and occasionally watering down the mixes into tints. That way I am able to see a wider range of mixing possibilities between two pigments. Each row of mixes features PO107 and the pigment labelled by the row.

This time I focused on some of my most frequently used pigments, pigments I used for a recent illustration, and pigments I used as part of my red/orange quest. With these three categories in mind I tried to represent at least one option for most primaries and secondaries.

Some of my favourite mixes with PO107 so far have been with Perylene Violet PV29 and Indanthrone Blue PB60. I discovered the variety of earth tones those can produce when painting the below illustration. By using a limited palette of PO107, PV29, PB60, PV19, and PY150 I was able to really push myself with finding earth tones.

Together with PV29 we get a variety of warm orange earth tones to lovely dark violet browns. Transparent Orange and Indanthrone Blue PB60 neutralise each other well, to produce a lovely range of warm and cool greys. When the three pigments are mixed together I was able to create gorgeous muted dark browns, which I swatched out in the large wash on the bottom-right of the above mixing chart. All of these combinations were used to create the earth tones in the illustration.

“Elven Time” (working title), 2025. Watercolour, colour pencil, and gouache.

The quest to find the red-orange/orange-red

Exploring PO107 is a step along my journey of trying to find a replacement for my favourite discontinued warm red: pre-2019 Transparent Pyrrol Orange. You can read more about that in previous (and I’m sure following) posts to this one, including all about using a red-orange as my warm red.

Going in to this I knew I wouldn’t be able to find a pigment that met all the qualities I am looking for. That would be nice, but it’s unrealistic.

So far PO107 doesn’t meet the hue, it’s definitely more orange leaning. However, all of its other qualities interest me. It has the transparency I am looking for, along with a lovely luminosity as a result. The balance of bright yet earthy is also a quality I loved with the old TPO. PO107 mixes hues that I love to use in my paintings and illustrations, and serves a similar purpose as that old TPO of creating earthy or mossy greens, gorgeous middle reds, and a variety of earth tones. I could see myself using it for that reason alone, but I wonder how well it would serve in my “warm red” spot long-term being more orange. Perhaps using it to create a warm red hue would be better. More testing is afoot.

In attempting to create a hue that replicates the old TPO, I find that Perylene Red Deep PR178 works well. Look at the mixes on the right of the PR178 row on the mixing chart earlier in this post. I have tried to standardise a similar hue, and seem to reach it at about a 4:1 ratio of PO107 to PR178. The only issue with this is that perylenes tend to not scan well according to a lot of my artist friends. In practice I have found that the scanner I use usually needs some adjustment when it comes to the orange/red and green/blue areas of the colour wheel anyway. I had to select different sections of the mixing chart and colour adjust them to closer match the chart in reality.

I plan to test the potential scanning issues more though before settling on PO107+PR178 as a replacement hue, or deciding to even make a hue. Starting with an illustration that heavily uses PR178 to test its scanning temperaments further.

For now I’ll leave you there. Happy creating!