Description
The Apelles collection from Tom Robertson - is a very special set of oil paints, as a close to a work of art as unapplied paint can get! Hand mulled by Tom in cold pressed linseed oil, made in very small quantities, with huge attention to detail.
By using a combination of red, white, yellow and a cool black, an incredible variety of hues can be achieved. The magic is when the hues and tints are alongside each other, with the black behaving visually almost as a blue. This opens up a full range of temperature possibilities and covers the primaries whilst giving innate holistic colour harmony across all tints and shades.
Tom has named the collection after Apelles of Kos, a 4th Century BC painter of great renown - this palette of colours is where painting began and where an understanding of colour harmony and colour relationships started to emerge. From cave paintings to ancient Greece where this primary earth triad was called the Tetrachromatikon, it is visible later in works such as Rembrandt's self portrait as the Apostle Paul and later still in Anders Zorn's extraordinary use of these colours.
I exclusively used a variation of this palette for a year or so, and although working purely on figurative and portrait work with it, the amount it taught me about colour, colour mixing and harmony was staggering.
There are four 40ml tubes of paint included in the set. First up is Tom's utterly unique lead white replacement, about which more information can be found here. There is a golden yellow ochre made with an Italian yellow earth pigment, this has quite a bit more punch to the hue than a generic yellow ochre, enabling better greens to be made with the black, etc.
Speaking of which, the next tube is ivory black, which is in my opinion the 'secret sauce' in this recipe, I shunned black until using it in this context, consider it functioning as a blue here. Then we have Venetian red - a strong earth red - historically in this type of palette maybe vermilion would have been used for just a bit more punch, however given the price and toxicity of vermilion - the Venetian red gives just right amount of warmth and chroma and is naturally more harmonious with the other earth pigments.
Please note these are truly handmade paints with zero additives, the handling is less homogenous than standard modern paint ranges, for example the venetian red is quite loose and the white is short and stringy. Some of the bigger manufacturers use additives to provide conformity across different pigments at the cost of colour purity and pigment load, which is not the case here. It will help to store the paint on the cap enabling any excess oil to rise to the top or the crimped end of the tube.
Real paint - historically accurate - exceptional.
Pigments - Ivory Black (PBk9) - Venetian Red (PR102) - Italian Golden Ochre (PY43) - Lead White Substitute (PW5)