Lamp Black

What color is lamp black?

The story of lamp black

Lamp black is the only pigment you can make by holding a plate over a candle.

Soot is what fire leaves behind for free, so the oldest inks are thought to have been soot. Egyptian scribes were writing on papyrus in black by the twenty-sixth century BC. Around 1400 Cennino Cennini put the recipe in his painters' handbook: light a lamp of linseed oil, hold a clean pan over it, let the smoke gather, brush the black onto paper. No grinding needed, he said; it is already as fine as a pigment gets. The Roman word for soot ink, atramentum, shares a root with atrocious, which I find oddly cheering.

China made the best of it. Pellets of soot and animal glue turn up in tombs from about 256 BC, and the ink stick that grew out of them is still how calligraphers work: grind one end on a wet stone until the puddle is as dark as you want. Pine soot gives a bluish black, oil soot a warmer one. Europeans met the sticks through the India trade and named the result India ink, which annoys me slightly on China's behalf; India had its own soot ink, masi, from at least the fourth century BC.

Ivory black started as exactly what it says. The Greek painter Apelles is credited with a black made by burning ivory. Today the name means bone char: cattle bones heated to about 700 degrees Celsius with the air kept out, then ground. Bone char is only about a tenth carbon and the rest is calcium phosphate, which I suspect is why it reads softer and browner than lamp black. The black dresses and top hats in Manet's Music in the Tuileries, from 1862, are ivory black, and Renoir, who called black "the queen of colors", said he always came back to ivory black.

Mars black is the newcomer, a synthetic black iron oxide from the twentieth century, named for the god of war and patron of iron. It is opaque, non-toxic and lightfast to the top grade, the only one of the three that covers, and it dirties a mix faster than either. Which brings me to the rule every beginner hears: never use black. It exists for a reason: black straight from the pan sits in a shadow like a hole.

Here is where I part company with the rulebook. Black in moderation is the most useful color in the box. A speck grays a color faster than any complement without shifting the hue, and black with a warm yellow makes an olive green nobody believes until they try it. A painting in one black, thinned to five strengths, is how Chinese painters worked for a thousand years and how I still start a study when I cannot see what is wrong with it. Nobody needs to avoid black. They need to stop using it at full strength.

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 lamp black

You can mix a black, and the mixed kind is often the better one. Burnt sienna and ultramarine, about half and half, give a dark that reads as shadow rather than a hole; tip it toward the blue and you are most of the way to Payne's gray. Lamp black itself you cannot mix; nothing you combine is as fine or as deep as soot.

Black and yellow is the pairing that matters. A warm yellow with a speck of lamp black turns into a natural olive green, the color of dried grass. Always add the black to the color, never the color to the black.

Using lamp black in watercolor

Use lamp black for line and wash. Draw with a waterproof pen, float dilute black over the drawing, and you have the oldest kind of picture there is. A sketch in one black, from pale gray to full strength, teaches values faster than any color lesson.

In a color painting, keep it for the true darks: the pupil of an eye, the gap in a fence, a window at night. Those are the places where a mixed dark looks brown and a pure black looks right.

Dry brush suits it. Drag a barely damp brush across rough paper and the broken line looks like an etching, which is no accident, since printer's ink was soot as well. For an even wash, reach for ivory black; it forgives a second pass.

One thing I learned the hard way: lamp black stains. A dark wash will not lift, and a brush rinsed in the sky water grays every wash that follows. Give it its own jar, or paint the black last. For darks without black, I wrote the mixes up in how to make black watercolor.

Lamp black vs ivory black (and Mars black)

Temperature and strength separate the two carbons. Lamp black is nearly pure carbon, so fine it behaves like a dye: tints come out blue-gray, a wash dries smooth, and once it is in the paper it stays. Ivory black is bone char, mostly calcium phosphate with a little carbon, and it shows: softer, warmer, browner in tints, and it lifts a little when re-wet.

Then there is Mars black, an iron oxide rather than a carbon. It is the only opaque black of the three, it runs warm and slightly gray, and it covers, which helps a correction and ruins a glaze. It also muddies a mix faster, so add it in specks.

For watercolor I would own ivory black first, because it forgives, and lamp black second, for ink work. If lamp black is a fresh printout, ivory black is a charcoal drawing, and Mars black is a coat of blackboard paint.

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.