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Contemporary knowledge dedicated to the making of traditional materials. Beautiful, high quality, bright paint.
 
Gamblin Artist's Oil Colours are made with pure pigments and the finest refined linseed oil. As there are no adulterants or additives in Gamblin colours, each colour retains its own unique characteristics including tinting strength, undertone and texture.
Gamblin is dedicated to maintaining the tradition of oil painting while also working towards an artist's studio with no exposure to toxic solvents.
 
Crafted by hand with the well-being of artists, their work, and the environment in mind. True to historic working properties, yet safer and more permanent, they combine the best traditions of the past with the latest technical innovations, giving you the freedom to create without compromise.
 
Made with the finest grades of pigment available, Gamblin Artist's Oils have luscious working properties, and each colour possesses unique characteristics in terms of texture, undertone, and tinting strength. The range of colours includes both historically accurate paints and modern, synthetically derived hues. 
 
All Gamblin Artist's Oil Paints are completely non-toxic when used as recommended. Most are made with alkali-refined linseed oil as a binder, which creates a strong, flexible paint film and yellows significantly less than cold press linseed oil, the traditional binder in oil paints. Select colours that use safflower oil as a binder. Not only are these vegetable oils completely non-toxic, but they are also commonly used in health and beauty products, so you can trust in their safety.
 
Yellows
 
The colour yellow appears to advance. It has the highest reflectivity of any colour.
 
Today hearing “yellow” many painters will think of Cadmium Yellow – brilliant and opaque. Cadmium Yellow replaced toxic Chrome (lead) Yellows. Although more expensive than Chrome Yellow, Cadmium Yellow was used by landscape painters, including Claude Monet, because of its higher chroma and its greater purity of colour.
Painters today can choose from among the cadmium yellows of the impressionists as well as the modern and more transparent Hansa yellows. Hansa yellows retain their intensity in tints and make beautiful glazes. Hansa Yellows can boost cadmiums in mixes; enabling brighter secondaries. Indian Yellow has been prized for hundreds of years and is ideally suited for glazing. In its transparency, it makes a glowing warm yellow—as if a painting were suddenly lit with summer sunshine.
 
Before the Industrial Revolution, painters used Yellow Ochres or Orpiment (sulphide of arsenic). Occasionally painters found some Gamboge, a strongly coloured secretion from trees that resembles amber. Gamboge was used for glazing before Indian Yellow became available in the middle of the 19th century. To make Indian Yellow, cows were force-fed mango leaves and given no water. Their urine was collected in dirt balls and sold as “pigment.” The resulting artists’ colour was a warm transparent glazing yellow. But Indian Yellow was lost somewhere between the decline of cruelty to animals and the rise of manufactured pigments.
 
In the 20th century, the most transparent of the yellows that we at Gamblin call “Indian Yellow” is a light stable diarylide pigment. In its transparency, it makes a glowing warm yellow—as if a painting were suddenly lit with summer sunshine.
 
A colour with obscure origins, Naples Yellow was originally lead antimoniate. Assyrian artists used this pigment to make the ceramic glaze. The contemporary history of this colour begins in the 18th century but “Naples Yellow” means more a colour than a chemical composition. Rubens used this colour extensively for skin tones. Because the original pigment is lead-based, Robert Gamblin formulated an excellent copy at a reasonable price.
 
Hansa yellow pigments were first made in Germany just before World War I. They are organic pigments that are semi-transparent and lightfast (Hansa Yellow Light is Lightfastness II, and Hansa Yellow Medium & Deep are Lightfastness I). In their mass tones, Hansa Yellows resemble Cadmium Yellows but the similarity ends there. Hansa Yellows make more intense tints and cleaner secondaries, especially when mixed with other organic (modern) colours like Phthalo Blue and Green. Because they are more transparent, Hansa Yellows have great value as glazing colours. Painters can also take advantage of the “temperature” shifts of the Hansas –- from coolest yellow (Hansa Yellow Light) to warm golden yellow (Hansa Yellow Deep).