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Opacity and Tinting Strength: Why Some Colours Go Ten Times Further
Mary

Criado por

Mary

24. setembro 2026FI
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Opacity and Tinting Strength: Why Some Colours Go Ten Times Further

Two paints of the same colour can behave completely differently in a mixture: one overwhelms everything it touches, the other disappears. That is TINTING STRENGTH, and it is not the same thing as opacity. OPACITY is how well a paint hides what is underneath it. It comes from the difference in refractive index between the pigment particles and the binder around them — the bigger that difference, the more light is scattered and the less gets through. Which explains something that puzzles everyone at first: a pigment can be intensely coloured and nearly transparent, or pale and completely opaque. Ultramarine and titanium white are opposite extremes of exactly this, and knowing which you have is what makes glazing and mixing predictable.
Intermediário
3 hours

Instruções

1

Refractive index is what makes a pigment opaque

A carregar o notebook Jupyter…

Materiais para este passo:

Conjunto de pigmentos minerais em póConjunto de pigmentos minerais em pó1 peça
Óleo de linhaçaÓleo de linhaça1 peça

Ferramentas necessárias:

Computador de secretáriaComputador de secretária
Moleta de vidroMoleta de vidro
Lupa de joalheiroLupa de joalheiro
2

Make a transparency chart and keep it

Draw a thick black line across a white card, then paint a band of every colour you own across it, in one consistent thickness. Where the line shows through, that paint is transparent. Label each band and keep the card. It answers, instantly and for your actual paints, the question that decides whether a colour can be glazed, whether it will cover an underpainting, and how it will behave in a mixture. Do it again for any new brand. Two tubes labelled the same colour from different makers can differ enormously in pigment load and therefore in both opacity and tinting strength — the label names the pigment, not the formulation.

Materiais para este passo:

Conjunto de pigmentos minerais em póConjunto de pigmentos minerais em pó1 peça
Óleo de linhaçaÓleo de linhaça1 peça

Ferramentas necessárias:

Conjunto de pincéis de artistaConjunto de pincéis de artista
RéguaRégua
3

Glazing and scumbling use the two ends of the range

A GLAZE is a transparent dark colour over a lighter layer. Light passes through it, reflects off the layer beneath and comes back through — so the colour is produced by light that has travelled through the paint twice, which gives a depth no opaque mixture reproduces. A SCUMBLE is the opposite: a thin, broken, semi-opaque light colour dragged over a darker one. The result is optical rather than mixed, and it is how skies and flesh have been painted for four hundred years. Both fail with the wrong pigment. A glaze in titanium white is a pale opaque smear; a scumble in ultramarine disappears. Choosing the pigment for its optical behaviour, rather than only its hue, is what makes either technique work.

Materiais para este passo:

Conjunto de pigmentos minerais em póConjunto de pigmentos minerais em pó1 peça
Óleo de linhaçaÓleo de linhaça1 peça

Ferramentas necessárias:

Conjunto de pincéis de artistaConjunto de pincéis de artista
Lupa de joalheiroLupa de joalheiro
RéguaRégua
4

Particle size changes both, and it changes with grinding

Scattering is strongest when the particles are roughly half the wavelength of light — around 0.2 to 0.3 micrometres. Larger or smaller and a pigment scatters less, so opacity has an optimum rather than rising forever with fineness. Which means grinding a pigment finer does not simply make it better. Natural ultramarine ground too fine becomes pale and grey, and the traditional coarse grind is not laziness — it is where the colour is. It also means two jars of the 'same' pigment can behave differently because they were milled differently. That is a real variable, it is invisible on the label, and it is one more reason to test what you actually have rather than what the name promises.

Materiais para este passo:

Conjunto de pigmentos minerais em póConjunto de pigmentos minerais em pó1 peça

Ferramentas necessárias:

Moleta de vidroMoleta de vidro
Lupa de joalheiroLupa de joalheiro

Materiais

2

Ferramentas necessárias

5

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