What Makes Rublev Colours Different?
Rublev Colours Artist Oils are formulated with pigment and drying oil without stearates, waxes, driers, or filler pigments. They are designed to preserve the individual character of natural, historical, traditional inorganic, and selected modern pigments. Each formulation is built around the pigment rather than forcing every colour into the same consistency.
The formulations are simple. The paint is built around pigment and drying oil rather than a routine additive package designed to make unrelated pigments feel alike. Each individual colour has pigment-specific handling, meaning body, flow, stringing, transparency, tinting strength, and drying vary. This is because pigments differ in particle size, particle shape, density, surface chemistry, and oil absorption. These differences influence whether a paint feels long, short, buttery, stiff, soft, stringy, or thixotropic. They are not manufacturing inconsistencies. They are different pigment–oil systems behaving according to their materials.
Note on Oil Color Swatches
The actual colour swatches for Rublev Colours Artist Oils were created with a full-strength application (left side) of colour and a tint (right side) made with equal parts of colour and titanium white and applied on acrylic primed cotton canvas.
The online swatches are approximations of the actual colour of the oil paint. Natural Pigments has carefully matched the colour in these images on calibrated colour monitors to the actual colour. However, because of the wide variance in coloru monitors, the results may vary.
Why the Colours do not Feel Alike?
Rublev Colours Artist Oils are formulated around the pigment rather than a standardized texture. Particle size, particle shape, density, surface chemistry, and oil absorption influence how each color behaves in the tube, on the palette, and under the brush.
Oil paint appears simple—solid pigment dispersed in a drying vegetable oil—but the pigment controls much of the paint’s behaviour. A color’s consistency cannot be evaluated independently of its particle size, shape, surface chemistry, density, and oil absorption. Coarse, crystalline, and irregular particles can produce visible texture and complex light scattering. High oil-absorption pigments generally require more binder and may produce softer paint. Dense pigments may settle more readily during storage when stabilizers are not used. Some pigments naturally accelerate drying, while others retard it. Transparency and opacity depend on pigment composition, refractive index, concentration, and film thickness.
Are all Rublev Colours made with the same drying oil?
No. Binder selection is product-specific. Many colours use linseed oil, while selected colours use walnut oil or a formulation that includes heat-bodied oil.
Oil Separation
Some separation of pigment and oil may occur in Rublev Colours Artist Oils, and it is a natural process when no wax or stabilizers are added to the paint to prevent it. A small amount of separated oil does not automatically indicate defective paint. Before opening a sound tube, gently massage it to redistribute the contents, then mix the expressed paint thoroughly on the palette.
Choose a White by More Than Opacity
Whites differ in tinting strength, bias, opacity, drying rate, density, and handling. Rublev Colours offers lead whites, titanium white, lithopone, and mixed whites so artists can select the behaviour needed for a specific passage or method. Lead whites provide distinctive long and comparatively moderate tinting strength. Titanium white provides high opacity and strong tinting power. Lithopone and mixed whites offer alternatives for softer tints and different handling. Binder choice can alter colour, flow, drying, and stringing within the same pigment family.
