Favorite Paint Mixtures: Permanent Alizarin Crimson

{Paint tubes and mixtures of Permanent Alizarin Crimson with six other colors}

Today, I want to share with you some of my favorite paint mixtures with Permanent Alizarin Crimson, and in this post I will also share how very flexible this color is, by being able to mix well into dark neutrals, middle value saturated or desaturated colors, or bright highlights, all depending on the amount of white you use.

Here are three scenes that all can have mixtures of alizarin crimson incorporated into them, if I were to paint them.

Aliz-Crimson-mixtures-bittersweet-berries

For the background grays, I would probably neutralize the grays a bit more, however one of my favorite blacks in oil paint is a pure mixture of straight aliz. crimson and phthalo green, and if I want to push it more green, I add a bit more green, and vice versa if the "black" needs to have more red in it...

When I brought home this flower arrangement, I was totally struck by how beautiful the purple stock were. I remember imagining mixing variants of cobalt green and cobalt turquoise lt with aliz crimson and permanent rose to create the perfect purples and violets I was seeing. I find that some of the most beautiful purples are not derived from purple paint at all, but are mixed.... do you ever look at a scene and begin to mix color in your mind? I do all the time...

One of the amazing side affects of mixing aliz crimson with a warm yellow, like cad. yellow lt, is that immediately the saturation of the two colors gets knocked down some, where when mixing aliz crimson with cad red the color becomes more full, enhancing the colors without losing any need for more saturation.

I love alizarin crimson for how versatile this pigment is.

Alizarin crimson is a transparent, cool, brilliant red, that has a strong staining characteristic, so it mixes well with other transparent pigments and also with opaques. In fact I really love some of the colors that result from mixing it with opaques like Cad. Yellow or Cad. Red, because you get a really rich, full bodied color that has strong covering attributes while also incorporating some of the subtleties that arise from working with a transparent color.

I use Permanent Alizarin Crimson made by Blue Ridge Oil Colors because I love how long this paint stays open compared to Winsor & Newton's version that will develop a skin within one day. Also it is always a good idea to pay the extra money for the "permanent" version of this paint because the regular alizarin crimson is a fugitive color and will oxidize towards a brown red eventually.

UPDATE 6/10/2021: I now use an alizarin crimson subsitute PR177, I use Michael Harding’s Alizarin Claret. Winsor & Newtons’s is also a good version as well.

Here are closeup images of each mixture: