Yellow Ochre

What color is yellow ochre?

The story of yellow ochre

Yellow ochre is dirt, and dirt is the oldest paint there is.

Dirt, in this case, means clay stained by iron. When the iron is a hydrated oxide, the mineral goethite, the clay is yellow; when it is hematite, the clay is red. Heat the yellow and it loses its water and turns red, which is how much of the world's red ochre got made. The name comes from the Greek okhros, meaning pale. Pale is generous.

People were grinding it long before anyone painted a picture. At Blombos Cave on the South African coast, archaeologists found a paint-making kit roughly 100,000 years old: ochre, grindstones, hammerstones, and two abalone shells used to mix and store a liquid pigment. Nobody knows what the paint was for. The horse at Lascaux is colored with yellow ochre and is about 17,000 years old; the bison at Altamira were done in ochre and charcoal in the same broad era. Lascaux was found by a teenager and his dog in 1940 and closed again in 1963, when the breath of twelve hundred visitors a day started damaging what seventeen thousand years had not.

Egypt made it a rule. In tomb paintings men were shown with brown faces and women with yellow ones, and yellow stood for gold, which the Egyptians considered imperishable. The Romans used it the same way, for gold and for skin, and it is all over the walls of Pompeii. Any old painting with a believable face in it probably has an ochre in there somewhere.

Industry came late. Roussillon, in the Vaucluse in southern France, sits on cliffs of yellow and red clay, and in the 1780s a local man named Jean-Etienne Astier worked out how to turn them into a product: dig clay that is ten to twenty percent ochre, wash the ochre free of the sand, settle it in basins, drain, dry, cut into bricks, crush, sift, sort by color. Vaucluse ochre went all over the world and thousands of people worked the quarries and factories, until the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War took away two of its biggest markets. The Roussillon quarries had already shut by 1930; you can walk the old workings today on the Sentier des Ocres.

What you buy today is mostly a factory version. Synthetic yellow iron oxide, sold as Mars yellow, has been made since the early 1920s, and by 2002 not one supplier of natural iron oxide pigment was registered with the Colour Index. Here is what has not changed. Yellow ochre is the dull yellow that makes clean yellows look clean. Put a lemon yellow next to it and the lemon sings; use it alone and it looks like a highlighter pen. Every palette has an ochre for the same reason every kitchen has salt.

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 yellow ochre

You can get close by dirtying a bright yellow with a touch of red and a speck of black; the recipe below does exactly that. What you cannot fake is the body. Real ochre is opaque and a little gritty, and a mixed version is cleaner and more transparent: fine for a wash, wrong for a stone wall.

Ultramarine is the partner that matters. Together they make the green of actual landscapes, olive and gray-green, a hedge in August rather than a cartoon hedge. Lean yellow for sunlit grass, lean blue for shadow, and add a little burnt sienna when the ground needs to look like ground.

Using yellow ochre in watercolor

Use it for anything the sun has been at: dry grass, sand, plaster, a path, the lit side of a stone wall, the warm side of a face. It is the color of most of the ground in most of the world, which is why landscape painters go through so much of it.

It is the best first wash I know. Wet the paper, float a thin yellow ochre over the whole sheet and let it dry before you start. Everything you put on top looks warmer and more settled, and the white paper stops shouting.

Pair it with ultramarine for greens and grays, with burnt sienna for autumn and brick, and with a cool red for skin. Keep the mixes loose; scrub it and it goes chalky and sits on the paper like dust.

One thing I learned the hard way: yellow ochre goes underneath, never on top. A wash of it over a delicate transparent color buries that color under a chalky film. Lay the ochre first and let the transparent colors go over it.

Yellow ochre vs raw sienna (and Mars yellow)

Raw sienna is the one people muddle it with; they are cousins rather than twins. Both are iron earths, but the sienna carries about five percent manganese oxide, which makes it darker and browner, and in a wash it lets the paper through where the ochre covers. Ochre is the covering yellow; raw sienna is the glowing one.

Mars yellow is the synthetic version of the same chemistry, PY42 instead of PY43, made in factories since the 1920s. It is cleaner, smoother and a touch brighter, and plenty of tubes labeled yellow ochre are Mars yellow inside. Not worse. Just tidier.

If you can only have one, take yellow ochre: it does the covering jobs and mixes the greens. Add raw sienna when you start caring about skies and skin. If yellow ochre is a plaster wall, raw sienna is a window with afternoon light in 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.