Lapis Lazuli

What color is lapis lazuli?

The story of lapis lazuli

The Egyptians had lapis lazuli for three thousand years and never worked out how to paint with it.

Most of the world's lapis comes from one place. Sar-i Sang, in the Kokcha valley of Badakhshan in northeast Afghanistan, has been mined for more than 6,000 years and supplied Persia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Lapis is not a mineral but a mixture: the blue part is lazurite, usually 30 to 40 percent of the stone, and the rest is white calcite and brassy pyrite, the fool's gold. Pliny called it "opaque and sprinkled with specks of gold." The name is Persian, lazhward, and it gave Spanish its azul and English its azure.

Both ends of the ancient world wanted it. Lapis reached Mesopotamia between about 4900 and 4000 BC, some 1,500 miles from the mines. In the Royal Tombs of Ur it turned up as a dagger handle, an inlaid bowl, amulets and the eyebrows of figures, and the Standard of Ur, a box from about 2550 BC, is a mosaic of shell, red limestone and lapis. Egypt bought its stone through Mesopotamian traders: lapis jewelry sits in graves at Naqada from 3300 to 3100 BC, and the eyebrows and eye surrounds of Tutankhamun's gold mask are lapis.

Nobody ground it into paint until much later, and the result disappointed. Crush lapis and you get an ashy gray-blue, because the calcite and pyrite come along for the ride. The first painters to use it anyway were decorating Buddhist cave temples in Afghanistan in the 500s and 600s. The trick that separates blue from gray, a dough of resin and wax kneaded in lye, reached Europe through Cennini around 1400. That is the story of ultramarine, which has its own page; the short version is that the cleaned pigment cost about ten times the stone.

Synthetic ultramarine, invented in 1826, ended lapis as a working pigment within a few decades, since the factory blue is chemically the same at a fraction of the price. The stone came back as a luxury. Several makers now grind it into a genuine lapis lazuli watercolor, and I want to be honest about it: it is paler, grayer and weaker than the PB29 in the same rack, because natural particles are coarser and the calcite never fully leaves. It granulates beautifully and lifts if you look at it.

Here is what I do instead. I do not own the stone in a pan, and I do not think a beginner should. What I love about lapis is the look of the rock, not the wash: deep blue with white clouds and gold flecks. You can paint that. Drop a granulating blue onto wet paper, let it settle, and while it is still damp touch in a few specks of Lemon Yellow. Pyrite, for pennies.

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 lapis lazuli

You cannot mix a stone, and you do not need to. Any ultramarine is lapis with the gray washed out: if you want the color, buy the tube, and if you want the rock, buy a ring. With yellow ochre the blue gives the dusty gray-greens of old bronze, and the two side by side are the gold and blue of every Egyptian collar. With burnt sienna it drops into the landscape gray every painter learns first.

Pyrite is the pairing I actually use. A granulating blue wash with a few dots of Lemon Yellow dropped in while it is damp reads as the stone itself. Keep the dots small; pyrite is a speck, not a stripe.

Using lapis lazuli in watercolor

Use lapis, or the look of it, for anything meant to be precious: a ring in a still life, the border of a manuscript page, the collar on an Egyptian figure. It looks best surrounded by the dull colors that flatter jewels: ochre, gray and old white.

Wet-on-wet is the technique. Wet the shape, drop the blue in at the top and let gravity do the mixing; the particles settle as it dries and give you the mottled surface of the polished stone.

It pairs with gold. Yellow ochre beside it, a little Venetian red in the ochre's shadows, and you have the palette of Tutankhamun's mask in three pans.

One thing I learned the hard way: do not glaze over it. Lapis lifts, so a second wash picks the first one up and leaves a hard-edged bloom where the stone should be smooth. Get the shape right in one pass and leave it alone.

Lapis lazuli vs ultramarine (and azurite)

Ultramarine is lapis with the gray removed, and since 1826 it has mostly been lapis with the rock removed too. Same Colour Index number, same chemistry, same violet lean. The difference is the particles: synthetic ones are small and even, so the color is cleaner and deeper; natural ones are coarse and mixed with calcite, so genuine lapis dries paler and grainier.

Azurite is the other old blue. It is a copper carbonate, greener than lapis, and it turns black if you heat it, which is how Cennini told painters to tell the two apart: ultramarine survives the fire. Azurite also weathers to green malachite over the centuries, which is why some Madonnas in museums wear mantles the color of a pond.

If ultramarine is the sky an hour after sunset, lapis is the same sky through a dusty window, and azurite is the sky reflected in a copper pan.

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.