The colour of UMBER

[RoyalBlue]

Diamine has had some stick for its naming, with colours such as umber being different from the suggestion of their name. Diamine Umber is a calm, darkish green ink, not at all brown.

 

Umber: shouldn't it be brown? Definitions suggest it should be, as in Burnt Umber.

 

However, Google image searching reveals quite a few instances of green colours - dark, muted - going by the name of umber for paints and other things that aren't inks. So maybe Diamine shouldn't be called to account for their naming; maybe Umber can be green as well as brown, whatever the origins of the colour are. In other words, it doesn't have to be green till it's burnt, whereupon it goes brown?

 

Anyone care to defend Steel Blue and other interesting Diamine names? At least they are memorable when they are hard to explain.

 

Tom

 

PS: I've read the discussions/scenarios about the origin of the Umber ink name in the review threads.

Edited July 19, 2009 by RoyalBlue

[Ink Stained Wretch]

Umber is greenish. Burnt Umber is a brownish color.

 

Most of us are used to Burnt Umber, but Umber is another valid color.

[SincerelySpicy]

Umber is greenish. Burnt Umber is a brownish color.

 

Most of us are used to Burnt Umber, but Umber is another valid color.

 

 

Raw umber has a greenish-brown masstone in which the green shows through well when used in thin layers such as watercolor washes. When used thickly, especially in oil paints, umber will look to be a very dark, almost black, cool toned brown. The problem with using pigment names to name inks is that pigments have very different properties when used in different ways, even if it is chemically the same compound.

 

An additional problem with a pigment such as umber is that it is traditionally an earth pigment, and unlike synthetics, they have a very wide range of properties and colors depending on where it came from. Earth pigments were traditionally derived from dirt and clay collected from various locales. Because of this, different umbers tended to have slightly differing properties.

 

Umber as a pigment is traditionally has a slightly greenish-brown mass-tone, and it seems that diamine umber was formulated to somewhat imitate unsaturated watercolor washes done with the pigment umber, rather than the same pigment densely saturated in, say, oil or acrylic, which the vast majority of people would think of when they imagine pigments and paints. The particular umber they compared it to probably had a slightly more green than is typical. Then again, the ones who named the colors could just have made a mistake.

 

Here's a chart to place the most common Earth Pigments in the tonal scale. Typically, if a color is close to to 0 in chroma and close to yellow in the spectrum, it will look more like a drab olive green.

 

 

Edit: Don't forget. Diamine Umber or the vast majority of inks for that matter do not use pigments. Pigments are finely ground solids. Inks are most frequently made of dyes and Diamine Umber does NOT contain Umber Pigment. It is solely a mixture of dyes that is named umber by the company.

Edited July 20, 2009 by SJM1123

[RoyalBlue]

Ink-stained Wretch & SJM1123,

 

Enlightening explanations - thanks very much for the expertise. I'll just need to link them to the reviews, where I don't think anyone was aware of the explanation.

 

Tom

 

Addendum: I've put in a link on each of the two reviews of Diamine Umber that questioned the choice of name.

Edited July 20, 2009 by RoyalBlue

[JakobS]

I never understood all the questioning of Diamine Umber, as any research would show the various shades from green to brown that umber can come in. With all the analysis ink goes through on this forum, and in the Ink Review Forum, I don't see how anyone could be fooled by the name alone, or for that matter buy Diamine Umber on the name alone. But, if they are looking for a brown umber ink, there is plenty to be found in the wide range of brown ink that is in the market, even within Diamine itself. I think Diamine Umber is quite an interesting color, one that can be widely used in one's writing endeavors.

[Paddler]

Umber is brown. If I don't happen to know that, I look in a dictionary and see that umber is brown. If I am looking for a green ink and see the name "Umber", I won't buy it because I think it is going to be brown. Is this a difficult concept, Diamine?

 

Quote from one of my dictionaries (the handy one): "an earth consisting chiefly of a hydrated oxide of iron and some oxide of manganese, used in its natural state as a brown pigment or, after heating, as a reddish-brown pigment."

 

The marketing at Diamine probably picked the name out of a hat and thought it was cute and neglected to look it up.

 

Paddler

Edited July 21, 2009 by southpaw

[JakobS]

Though a dictionary simplifies words for an easy understanding, when it comes to hues of color that were first established as paint, subtleties can and do occur. What one needs in the case of understanding the differences between Raw and Burnt Umber is not so much a dictionary as perhaps a color chart. A look through the variety of umber paints shows that Raw Umber is indeed more greenish brown, similar to Diamine Umber. Burnt Umber is, as the process of heating the iron within it creates, a reddsih brown. Perhaps, Diamine should name it Raw Umber instead of just umber, and bring out a Burnt Umber to satisfy the people seeking that hue. But, as I said before, Diamine has a number of browns that could satisfy one's Burnt Umber needs.

Edited July 21, 2009 by JakobS

[nickyd]

My early dabbling with colours came with philately. Burnt Umber was one colour that fascinated me as well as Prussian Blue.

These were often unusual variations of more common stamps, as I recall. Perhaps someone at Diamine had the same roots as I.

Can't recall Umber being green,though. Do any manufacturers make an ink in Tyrian Plum?-That was a philatelic rarity!

N.

[encephalartos]

I agree with Ink Stained Wretch. Raw Umber (not calcined) is a coolish dark brown. Diluted it is

sometimes greenish. Burnt Umber (calcined) is a warmer brown.

 

However, for an earth color that is really green, check out Green Earth, or Terre Verte. That is

a dark green, but as a pigment, it is not very strong in mixing. (If you have mixed paint, you

find out that some paints mix more strongly than others. Prussian Blue is notorious for over-

powering other colors in a mix, so if it's being used, you start with only a tiny drop. (All of

this is about paint and pigment, not ink.)

[Federalist Pens]

 

Yes, Diamine names are open to interpretation. Aside from Umber, Prussian Blue is more of a blue-black than the color Daimine has with that name. Diamine Blue black is more like a dark teal- it has a lot of greenish tone in it.

 

I like it, but consider it a teal more than a dark blue. Prussian Blue is one of my favorite Blue Blacks! The ironic thing now is that Diamine has recently introduced a color known as Dark Teal!

 

Confused yet???

 

Frank

[gyasko]

Umber is dirt from Umbria.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/Pigment_umber_raw_iconofile.jpg

 

Looks pretty brown to me.

[PatientType]

I have seen dedication on this site. I've seen people go to great lengths to help others find information. However, going all the way to Umbria to find a handful of Italian dirt to photograph is absolutely heroic.

[SincerelySpicy]

Umber is dirt from Umbria.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/Pigment_umber_raw_iconofile.jpg

 

Looks pretty brown to me.

 

 

To be honest, to say that umber is dirt from umbria is a gross oversimplification, and is no longer truly accurate. It is also potentially misleading to those who are not versed in fine arts.

 

The pigment umber can come from various locations, and one of the best locales for natural umber is considered to be Cyprus. The pigment umber can also be synthetically produced in labs around the world.

 

The name umber not only has its roots in its historical origins, but also comes from the latin term umbra which means shadow, and the fact that umber as a pigment was used very frequently in formulating paint colors used to paint shadows in paintings.

 

Also, the color of dry pigments that have not been dispersed in a vehicle or binder is ABSOLUTELY by no means the color that it will take on once in a paint mixture. Dry umber does have the color shown in the photo but when dispersed in a paint medium it becomes a near black yellowish brown.

 

This is not to say that the diamine color is by any stretch of the imagination an accurate representation of the colors achievable by the pigment.

Edited July 21, 2009 by SJM1123

[SincerelySpicy]

I have seen dedication on this site. I've seen people go to great lengths to help others find information. However, going all the way to Umbria to find a handful of Italian dirt to photograph is absolutely heroic.

 

 

That's a wiki photo of the pigment, not necessarily from umbria, probably synthetic.

[encephalartos]

I have seen dedication on this site. I've seen people go to great lengths to help others find information. However, going all the way to Umbria to find a handful of Italian dirt to photograph is absolutely heroic.

 

 

That's a wiki photo of the pigment, not necessarily from umbria, probably synthetic.

 

From some books I've read on paint, it sounds like most of them are synthetic iron oxides

now. The one in the photo looks like "Burnt Umber", not raw umber, but it also looks like

it's dry, not wet. Where I grew up as a kid, the dirt was grey when dry and black when wet.

I didn't understand all the references in books to "brown earth". Compost is a dark brown.

After the family traveled some more, I saw places with red dirt. In the Oklahoma City zoo,

the elephants looked pink from rolling in red dirt and getting it on their light grey skin.

[JakobS]

In looking at the entomology of the word Umber, I think this whole debate can be settled in knowing the umber comes from the terms umbra and umbrage, the latter taking on a meaning in 1620 of having a "suspicion that one has been slighted", which fits Diamine Umber quite well for those amongst us unhappy with it!!

Edited July 21, 2009 by JakobS

[gyasko]

If you go to Umbria, it's easy to see where the name of the pigment comes from. And yes, lots of it's synthetic or from somewhere else, but it still looks like dirt from Umbria. It's the same with Sienna pigment, which looks remarkably like the dirt around Sienna.

 

I'd also have to say that i disagree with SJM about the relation of pigments to colour in paintings. I think there is a noticeable relation. In any case, my umber and burnt umber paints do not look green.