Indian Red

What color is Indian red?

The story of Indian red

Indian red is rust, and rust was a paint long before it was a problem.

Hematite is the mineral, red iron oxide, named from the Greek word for blood, and red ochre is clay stained with it. People have been grinding it for a long time: red ochre was being processed in Africa around 300,000 years ago, and a block of it engraved with a pattern turned up at Blombos Cave in South Africa from about 75,000 years ago. The Egyptians used the ochres for skin. Men in tomb paintings were always brown-faced and women yellow, and red ochre was rouge for the living.

In antiquity the finest red earth came through Sinop, a Greek colony on the Black Sea, from mines in Cappadocia. It was stamped with a seal, and sinopia became the general word for a dark red ochre for the next thousand years. By the Renaissance the same stuff was also called Venetian red. Cennino Cennini, writing around 1400, mixed the lightest sinopia he could find two to one with lime white, called it cinabrese and used it for faces, hands and nudes in fresco. Venetian red was first recorded as an English color name in 1753. It points at Venice, and that is about all the records say about why.

The Indian in Indian red is the plain kind: the earth was shipped from India, where the ground in many places is red laterite, a soil named in 1807 from the Latin for brick because you can cut it with a spade and it hardens into a building block in the air. Diderot's Encyclopedie had an entry for Indian red in 1765 and noted that some people called it, improperly, English red. The name ran into trouble later. In 1999 the crayon maker Crayola renamed its Indian Red crayon Chestnut after teachers reported that children assumed it described the skin of Native Americans. It described a soil.

Caput mortuum is the strange one. The words are Latin for dead head, the alchemists' term for the useless residue left in the flask, which they drew as a skull. Rust is exactly that kind of leftover, and the purple-brown iron oxide that came out of sulfuric acid works in the 1600s and 1700s took the name. Painters used it for the robes of cardinals and saints, and much the same chemistry, roasting green vitriol with chalk, is how Venetian red came to be made in factories. Since the 1900s nearly every red oxide in a tube is synthetic PR101, and the old names have become descriptions of temperature: Venetian red warm, Indian red cool, caput mortuum purple, English red a tone of Indian red, light red a yellow ochre roasted until its water leaves.

What you buy today is rust made on purpose, and I mean that as praise. It is opaque, it is cheap, and it will outlast the paper. Indian red is a brick in shade, a terracotta pot, the shadow side of a sunburnt face, and it is the pigment I reach for when a painting needs weight. The kit's Venetian Red is the everyday version: a little warmer, a little more orange, exactly as permanent. It looks dull in the pan and right on the paper.

Pigment facts

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix Indian red

You can get close to Indian red from a warm red and a little green, or from burnt sienna with a touch of ultramarine, but the mixture will be more transparent and less stubborn than the real thing. Opacity is what you are buying with iron oxide.

Ultramarine is the partner that matters. Equal parts make a violet-gray that is the best storm cloud I know, and it splits both ways: more red for the shadow on a brick wall, more blue for a shadow on snow. With yellow ochre it makes every brick, tile and flowerpot in a Mediterranean street.

Using Indian red in watercolor

Use Indian red for anything built or baked: brick, tile, terracotta, the rust on a gate. It is the shadow side of all those things; Venetian red is their sunlit side.

Faces are its oldest job. A very dilute wash of Indian red, warmed with a speck of yellow ochre, is Cennini's cinabrese in watercolor terms, and it sits under a portrait better than any pink. Keep it thin; at full strength it is a brick.

Granulation is worth exploiting. On rough paper a wet wash settles into the grain and dries like a weathered wall, so lay it flat for old plaster. Glazing over it is the thing to avoid: it is opaque and a little chalky, and a pale color on top goes muddy.

One thing I learned the hard way: it is the strongest tinter in the earth family. A brush rinsed in the water jar will pink every wash that follows, and a speck too much in a green makes mud. Add it last, in small amounts, with its own rinse water.

Indian red vs Venetian red (and caput mortuum)

Temperature is the whole difference between the first two. Indian red is the cool one, a brick red with a faint violet cast, and the most opaque of the family. Venetian red is warmer and more orange, and its tints come out a warm pink where Indian red's come out grayer. Both are the same iron oxide; particle size and roasting do the rest.

Then there is caput mortuum, the purple end of the same oxide, a brown-violet that looks like dried blood in the pan and old velvet on the paper. It is the darkest of the three and the best for shadows on anything red, because it darkens without turning brown.

If Venetian red is a brick in the afternoon sun, Indian red is the same brick in shade, and caput mortuum is the brick after dark.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.