Description
It sounds like a cross between a terrible disease and a criminal offence, but it is actually a very interesting earth colour!
In masstone it is deep purple/brown, you can see it's purple nature straight from the tube. It has decent tint power, providing a wide range of steps from muted purple browns, to quite cool gentle lilacs, although I was using Titanium white to tint which would cool it considerably in the lighter tints. It is a little browner to my eye than the swatch shows.
It is a really quite a unique hue for an earth and fills in a gap for an earth in the violet spectrum of the colour wheel, like so many Rublev colours this is going to be very useful in portrait/figurative work.
An interesting description from Rublev below, something I have observed a lot in oil paint;
"Every pigment is capable of yielding two distinct hues according to whether it is painted transparently or solidly mixed with white. The effect of using Violet Hematite painted thinly transparent and in solid color extends the range of hues accessible with it.
Try rubbing a little Violet Hematite on a white surface, mixed with oil or a painting medium, sufficiently thinned to show the white surface through it. You get a purple lake hue. Now take the same color and mix a little white paint with it and paint it solidly across the thin paint. It is quite a different color.
The shift is more dramatic in Violet Hematite than in many other colours. The explanation for these color differences was observed by Harold Speed (1987), "All colors are made warmer when painted over light grounds transparently, and all colors are made colder when mixed with white."
Technical Overview
Pigment - PR102
Binder - Linseed Oil
Opacity - Opaque
Tinting Strength - High