Supergranulating colours have become incredibly popular recently. You will see them everywhere, from the Schmincke supergranulation range to the Lunar range from Daniel Smith, the Holbein range, and many others in various different brands. I have an awful lot of them in my studio. It is certainly not that they are bad paints. Some of them are truly amazing, but a lot of them can be quite disappointing.
So let us talk about what they are, what my favourites are right now… but also why you do not actually need to buy them, and what you could do instead.
This post features affiliate links to Jackson’s art. If you choose to buy from them, I will get a small commission, but it won’t affect the price. Thank you very much for the support. The links will also help you find the exact pigments and watercolours that I’m mentioning throughout this post.
Decoding the letters on your tubes
If you look on the side of any watercolour tube, you will notice some codes. These codes are letters and numbers that tell you exactly what is inside. They’re actually broken up in a really clear and obvious way, but I must confess it took me years to realize just how simple the codification is. I’ll explain that just now, and below I’m going to describe a few key pigments for our super granulating properties.
- P: This simple letter lets you know the paint contains pigments, rather than dyes.
- Color Letter(s): The next letter or combination identifies the main colour family.
- R: Red
- Y: Yellow
- B: Blue
- G: Green
- O: Orange
- V: Violet
- Br: Brown
- W: White
- Bk: Black
These codes are on all pigments, not just these granulating ones. It is literally telling you the recipe and exactly what pigments are in there. This can be really important for a lot of reasons. It tells you if you have got a real colour or a cheaper fake version. It also tells you a lot about the properties of the pigments and how the paint might look when it dries. Clever people in laboratories have made a recipe using pigments which have different properties.
The science of pigment properties
Pigment properties is a topic that I talk a lot about in the Urban Course on my website. It is something really important to know about if you want to improve your sketching. In short, certain pigments are more prone to having big, heavy granules.
Ultramarine Blue (PB29) is a classic heavy pigment. Iron oxides like Brown Iron Oxide/Burnt Sienna (PBr7) and carbon-derived chemicals tend to be heavier as well. Because they are heavy, they sink quickly into the low points of your watercolour paper. Other pigments, like Quinacridone Magenta (PR122), tend to be lighter and much finer.
This means when you use a lot of water, they do different things. The long and the short of it is that someone has thought about what physical properties these different pigments have. They have combined them in a clever way, which produces an awesome effect where the heavy pigments sink and the light pigments float.
My favourite premixed options
While you do not need them, I do have some favourites. Tundra Violet containing Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and PBr6 (Mars Brown / Iron Oxide Brown) is an absolutely amazing colour. Look at the heavy separation and granulation, with softer red-earth tones floating to the edges.
Tundra Blue containing Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and Brown Iron Oxide (PBr7) is really simple and very lovely to use. I believe that they must use very little of the PBr7 as blue is clearly the strongest tone here – but there is a subtle muting effect compared to pure ultramarine.
Petal shadow (by Jackman’s) containing Quiacridone Magenta (PR122) Monoazo (Hansa) Yellow (PY6) and Barium Copper Silicate (Cerulean blue) (PB35) is a beautiful colour as well. And made by a very small manufactuer in England. We can see in the sketch below the quite stunning effect of the granulation.
Now, whilst these are all very lovely, there are an awful lot of others which I’ve tried and simply not been super impressed by. For example, below is Urban Yellow, Tundra Turquoise, and Urban Red, all by Schminke. Whilst none of them are terrible, a little like the tundra blue above, none of them feel that exciting, and the yellow in particular barely feels granular at all. Whilst the turquoise really just feels like cobalt turquoise, in fact, I can barely feel it being different at all.
The other issue with using these colors neat from a tube is that you can’t change the mix at all, whereas there’s a lot of power in us mixing our own, for example, because then you can create all sorts of different effects rather than just being forced to use the exact formula that the manufacturer has deemed is best.
How to mix your own granulating magic
You can create these exact effects using standard paints. Here is a step-by-step look at some beginner mixes that will be in most palettes.
- Earth Green Mix: Combine Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and Quinacridone Gold (PO48). The heavy blue sinks into the paper texture while the light yellow-gold floats on top, creating a beautifully separated earthy green. (Insert photo for this mix here)
- Textured Purple Mix: Mix Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and Quinacridone Magenta (PR122). This produces a stunning purple where the pinkish-red lifts to the surface and the blue settles into the grain. (Insert photo for this mix here)
- Granulating Grey Mix: Blend Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and Burnt Sienna (PBr7). Both are quite heavy, but they separate wonderfully in a watery wash to give you a complex, textured shadow colour. Notice this is the exact same mix that is used in Tundra Blue. It’s also a mix which is often used in Payne’s Grey. So these two very common pigments can form extremely different things, and this is a really clear example of showing us how the same two pigments, if we have the freedom to mix ourselves, can create an awful lot of different variety.
A catch-all cheat code.
As a final mix, which most of us will have access to, you’ll find colours like Mars Black, Lamp Black, or Ivory Black in a lot of beginner palettes. Ideally, we’d actually avoid black in our mixes almost entirely because it tends to deaden colours. But colours like Mars Black or Ivory Black, which are incredibly granulating, mixed carefully and with plenty of water, can create a beautiful, super granulating effect with any other color.
Here’s a touch of Mars black within Perylene red. Well, just look at it. It’s pretty epic.
Recreating the Petal Shadow effect
As I’ve said, petal shadow is one of my absolute favorite colors. Now, one of the reasons that I started looking into mixing my own colours was a serendipitous moment of discovery. I was painting a landscape and I found a beautiful mix which I felt at the time was quite similar. Now, as I’ve experimented, it’s quite clear looking at the swatches below that these two are different, but the amount of movement and the kind of atmosphere they generate is where I think the similarity does indeed lie. On the left we have Petal Shadow, and on the right we have my own brand mix.
Perylene Violet (PV29) with Cobalt Turquoise (PB36) are the two colours which are making this up. Both of these pigments are very granular, which gives you a lot of white paper where water pushes and pulls the pigment away and different areas of turquoise or that perillin violet moody purple where those pigments themselves settle in slightly different places.
Some scenes as examples.
Firstly, I wanted to try out those vivid greens, which emerged in our ultramarine quinacridone gold mix. So I used a simple lighthouse scene as a framework, and you can see the effect below.
At the top you can see my colors making up the swatches. So you may also notice I’ve used my cerulean blue perillin violet to create shadows and mood in the sea and the lighthouse as well. Below I’ve used slightly brighter ultramarine violet plus quinacridone magenta, which in some ways has a similar effect, but in this scene you can really see that bright glowing almost neon feel of those magentas pushing around. Notice the very heavy granular Mars black popped in for good measure.
And just for one final example, here we have a scene from Sarajevo, again featuring ultramarine as the primary pigment, and then a little bit of burnt sienna to bring it together and create those pains greys, that tundra blue, and everything else in between.
