Umber

What color is umber?

The story of umber

Umber is one of the oldest pigments on earth, and nobody can agree on what its name means.

Some say it is named for Umbria, the region in central Italy. Others say it comes from the Latin umbra, shadow, by way of the Italian terra d'ombra, shadow earth. I want the second one to be true, because shadow is exactly what the color does. Chemically it is a clay stained with iron oxide, like ochre and sienna, plus one thing they have far less of: manganese, 5 to 20 percent of it against about 5 percent in raw sienna. That pushes it from tan to a proper brown and gives raw umber its faint green cast. The biggest deposits are on Cyprus, which is still the main source.

Painters in Europe took to it in the late 1400s, and by the 1600s it was doing the heavy lifting on the dark side of the palette. Caravaggio and Rembrandt both kept it alongside sienna and yellow ochre, and in one of Rembrandt's late portraits in London the priming itself turned out to be lead white tinted with umber. Vermeer used it in the wall behind the sleeping woman in the Met's A Maid Asleep. It was cheap, and in oil it dries fast, because manganese is a drier, the same metal that goes into the drying agents sold for house paint.

Not everyone was a fan. Edward Norgate, an English painter of the 1600s, called it "a foul and greasy color." Antonio Palomino in Spain called it "very false," and the Belgian Jan Blockx said it "should not appear on the palette of the conscientious painter." The Impressionists dropped it too, mixing their browns from the new synthetic colors. Umber outlasted all of them. It is still in nearly every paint range, usually twice.

Raw umber is the earth as dug, washed and ground: cool, greenish, a little dusty, like dried mud in shade. Burnt umber is the same powder roasted. The heat drives water out of the iron oxides and turns part of them into hematite, the red iron oxide, so the color warms, reddens and darkens until it is nearly black in the pan. The name was first recorded in English in 1650. Most of what you buy is still the natural earth, though some makers now use synthetic oxides.

Here is the part that matters if you paint in watercolor. Umber is the best dark I know for shadows: transparent enough to glaze over a finished passage without killing it, and it lifts if you go too far. Burnt umber with ultramarine makes a black that looks like a shadow instead of a hole. I reach for it far more often than black.

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 umber

You can get close to both umbers without buying them. Burnt sienna with a little ultramarine, about four to one, lands on burnt umber; the blue knocks the orange out of the sienna. For raw umber, start with yellow ochre and gray it down with a touch of black until it looks like dried mud.

The pairing that matters is burnt umber and ultramarine. Equal parts give a soft black with life in it; tip it toward the blue for a cool shadow, toward the brown for a warm one. That one pair covers most of the darks in a landscape, and it is the same idea as Payne's gray, done by hand.

Using umber in watercolor

Use umber for anything brown in real life and for most things in shadow: tree trunks, soil, old wood, the inside of a barn door. Raw umber is the one for shadows on pale things, because its green cast keeps them from turning muddy orange. Burnt umber is for anything warm.

Glazing is where it earns its place. Let a wash dry completely, then float a thin, watery burnt umber over the part that should sit back. The first layer shows through, the value drops, and the color stays alive. I still do this when a painting looks flat and I cannot tell why.

It pairs with almost everything. With ultramarine it makes every gray and black you need; with yellow ochre, every autumn field.

One thing I learned the hard way: burnt umber at full strength granulates, so on rough paper a flat wash will not be flat. It dries speckled, like sand at the bottom of a glass. Lovely on a tree trunk, a disaster on a smooth tabletop. Thin it down when you need a wash without texture.

Umber vs burnt sienna (and Van Dyke brown)

Burnt sienna is the color people mix up with burnt umber most, fairly enough: both are roasted iron earths sold under the same Colour Index code. The difference is manganese. Sienna has a little and umber has a lot, so burnt sienna dries to a bright orange-brown and burnt umber to the color of strong coffee. Sienna is also the more transparent, better for glazing warm light and worse for deep shadow.

Van Dyke brown is the other one. The original was Cassel earth, dug from peat and soil around Kassel and Cologne, and it fades; modern versions are mixtures of a black and an iron oxide. It runs cooler and more transparent than burnt umber, with a slight purple cast in thin washes. A beautiful glaze and a poor foundation.

If burnt sienna is a brick wall in the afternoon sun, burnt umber is the same wall after the sun has gone, and raw umber is the puddle at the bottom of it.

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.