Daniel Smith Primatik Gemstone Watercolours

In my general obsessive search for the weird and wonderful in the world of colour and insatiable thirst for knowledge on a subject I have of course read up about many of the weird and wonderful materials that have been used to provide pigments, gemstones being one.

This is not so extravagant as it sounds; the original ultramarine, before a chemically identical synthetic version was created, was simply ground up lapis lazuli, and many other minerals and earths are common today.

Daniel Smith have created a range of watercolours made from natural minerals, and a very reasonably priced “starter box” of these is widely available. This contains 5ml tubes of:

• Rhodonite Genuine
• Jadeite Genuine
• Amethyst Genuine
• Mayan Blue Genuine
• Hematite Genuine
• Piemontite Genuine

A few notable sources are slightly disparaging of the marketing romance of this range, but I am always up for interesting materials and these of course made it to my Christmas List. I hinted so strongly that I had already bought a tiny “nippet tin” pallete box to enable me to sqeeze out small blobs and keep them safe (rather than making a full half-pan of such exquisite paint)…

They really are very nice. Obviously due to their origins they are all granulating pigments, with some lovely individual properties.

The Rhodonite is a beautiful magenta colour – if you want a purple lake, or quinocridone violet that granulates, this is your stuff. The Jadeite is a lovely green – somewhere between emerald and viridian, but very dark in masstone – I can see this as a granular compatriot to perylene green. The Amesthyst is truely amazing. It is also almost black in masstone, with purple and lilac undertones, and a gorgeous sparkle (which sadly the scanner has not picked up). The texture is just lovely.

The Mayan Blue is a nice alternative to indigo, or Prussian blue – Daniel Smith claim that this is formulated in the historical way, which is indeed indigo dye laked on to palygorskite, a fuller’s earth. The Piemontite is a lovely red/brown, reminiscent of many earth tones, particularly caput mortuum. It granulates nicely to different red and browns with an almost lilac grey in the undetone. The Haematite is blacker than I expected, though there’s a very subtle red in the undertone with amazing heavy granulation. I can see this as a great mixer, but it shines in it’s own right as a black/grey.

I painted this rock sketch, based on the Great Mewstone with just the colours from the pack – you can really see the granulation from the haematite here.

I though this idea would be great to play with the paints on these tiny rock sketches, similar to the micro landscapes I painted recently, using two colours for each. The sky and sea is the Dumont’s blue from Winsor and Newton.

All in all, these are lovely paints, and really interesting to use. In day to day use there’s nothing that cannot be obtained elsewhere, but they are interesting, fun and to be fair not overly more expensive than many other preparations.