Synthetic Earth

Holbein company had a line of watercolour paint called Irodori Antique, but recently they discontinued and replaced it with a similar line of gauche-like paints. Avenue des arts put their Irodori stock in a bin and I picked up a tube of russet brown. Like most paint names, its an ill-defined concept, but you can think of russet brown like 'leather jacket' brown. Its almost exactly what you would expect when you think of brown as a colour. To understand it a bit better, I put some of the russet brown on the top left of this painting, and then completed the scene with a variety of other browns and on the bottom, synthetic red-orange, magenta, and red. Russet brown was closest to Caput Mortuum, which you see in the tree and roots structure on the right side of the painting. Caput Mortuum translates to 'dead head' because legend has it that they used to grind up Egyptian mummies into a brown powder to make brown paint! Its an unlikely tale, but makes for a good yarn none the less. In fact, virtually all paints now are synthetic, even the ones sold as earth or natural. Small companies may still use artisanal pigments, for example some of the paints from Stone Ground paints, a Canadian company, might have been authentic. You can see my example of their earth paints in the Armenia painting from the World Inspired Landscape series. 

Synthetic Earth, watercolour 9 x 6" watercolour paper, March 2026