The Michael Harding Brecon Beacons Oil Colour collection is the final release of four sets created to celebrate the company’s 40-year anniversary. Each title acknowledges a key location from their history, and Brecon Beacons refers to the current site in South Wales, where Michael Harding has operated since 2010. It follows the release of the Tunbridge Wells, Brick Lane, and Whitechapel sets. Every collection in this series brings 10 new individual paints to the Michael Harding oil range, which are also available to buy as whole box sets. This selection adds a variety of transparent and semi-transparent colours, perfect for building up vibrant glazes and casting chromatic shadows.
Properties of the Brecon Beacons Oil Colour Collection
The Brecon Beacons collection collates a warm, transparent selection of variations on key primary and secondary colours, making it a comprehensive palette for painting with just a white added. There are a few cool colours – Bismuth Vanadate, Forest Green, and Cosmic Blue – with the rest being on the hot side. The darker colours are perfect for mixing blacks and reinforcing chromatic shadows, making them useful for portraiture and landscape painting alike. The colours are inspired by the shifting hues of the Brecon Beacons mountain range, with its heathlands, dramatic skies, and deep valleys.
Each paint in the set is 40ml and made to the high standard expected from the Michael Harding brand. The paints are handmade using pure pigments, ground in linseed oil, and solvent-free.
The great majority of the colours in the set are transparent or semi-transparent, with no fully opaque colours. There are four transparent colours: Hansa Yellow Medium, Pyrrole Crimson, Perrindo Maroon, and Imperial Purple, and five semi-transparent colours: Bismuth Vanadate, Amber, Corinthian Purple, Cosmic Blue, and Forest Green. This just leaves Cobalt Blue Deep, which is semi-opaque – although, from my swatches, I found it very appealing when painted thinly too. Later in this article, I test glazing each of these transparent and semi-transparent colours over an underpainting.
Swatching the Colours
Bismuth Vanadate
Pigments: PY184 (Bismuth Vanadate Yellow)
Series Number: 4
Opacity: Semi-Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Bismuth Vanadate is a bright cool yellow, which leans slightly towards green. It’s an inorganic pigment, which was first popularised in the 1980s for commercial use. This pigment is often suggested as a less toxic alternative to Cadmium Yellow. It’s the ‘primary’ yellow of this set, and is useful for mixing clear and cool greens and oranges, which you’ll see in my mixing tests below.
Hansa Yellow Medium
Pigments: PY97 (Hansa Yellow Medium)
Series Number: 3
Opacity: Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Hansa Yellow Medium is another single pigment addition to the range, with high tinting strength and slow drying time. It’s the warmer version of Hansa Yellow, leaning slightly towards orange. This bright sunflower yellow glows when dispersed thinly. This paint felt the stiffest to handle straight from the tube, but its flow wasn’t hindered when dispersed with medium.
Amber
Pigments: PY74, PR170, PY3 (Arylide Yellow, Naphthol Red, Hansa Yellow)
Series Number: 2
Opacity: Semi-Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Amber is a mixed pigment paint that forms a rich tomato red. When the paint is diluted with medium, it appears more orange, revealing its ‘amber’ quality. It mixed beautifully with Bismuth Vanadate to create a punchy tangerine orange. Amber positively glows when placed alongside the darker colours and blues in this set.
Pyrrole Crimson
Pigments: PR264 (Pyrrole Red Rubine)
Series Number: 3
Opacity: Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Pyrrole Crimson uses the single pigment Pyrrole Red Rubine, which is a slightly different pigment than we see in Pyrrole Red (PR254). Both Pyrrole Reds are named after the Greek word for fiery – pyrrhós. These pigments were first developed for painting vehicles, and are good replacement colours for Cadmium Red. This colour is deeper than Pyrrole Red and has a very strong payoff, which may overpower some other colours when mixed. I saw this happen in the lovely red-browns it created when mixed with Forest Green and Cobalt Blue Deep.
Perrindo Maroon
Pigments: PR179 (Perylene Maroon)
Series Number: 3
Opacity: Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Perrindo Maroon is a synthetic organic colour, which is a deep maroon red applied straight from the tube, and a dull neutral brown-red when dispersed. It’s an earthy colour so would be perfect for landscapes and portraiture alike. Next to the sharper red colours in the collection like Amber and Pyrrole Crimson, it could be applied in the place of Alizarin Crimson for deepening shadows. I mixed it to create some more complex deep browns with the other colours in the set.
Corinthian Purple
Pigments: PR112, PB29, PV23 (Naphthol Red, Ultramarine Blue, Dioxazine Violet)
Series Number: 2
Opacity: Semi-Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Corinthian Purple (also known as Tyrian or Corinthian Purple) is the name for a historic pigment that was extracted from the mucus of marine snails to dye rich purple fabrics, with evidence of use that goes back as far as 1200 BC. Since each garment required processing thousands of snails, it was an exceptionally valuable and prized colour, which is where the correlation between the colour purple and royalty comes from. Today, the pigment is no longer produced in this laborious way, and is instead imitated by mixing other pigments. The Michael Harding Corinthian Purple is a red-leaning deep plum or beetroot colour, which appears almost like a red-black straight from the tube, revealing more purple as it’s dispersed.
Imperial Purple
Pigments: PB29, PV19 (Ultramarine Blue, Quinacridone Rose/Violet)
Series Number: 2
Opacity: Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Corinthian Purple was also referred to as Imperial Purple, so this colour shares the same inspiration as the previous paint, but is made with a different mixture of pigments. The original snail mucus pigment produced a variety of different purples, so it isn’t inaccurate to produce a paint that is more blue leaning too. This Imperial Purple is made with the classic combination of Ultramarine Blue and Quinacridone Rose, and is a bright ‘royal’ purple that would seem at home on robes and crowns. When dispersed, it appears as a rich violet colour, which would be very useful for botanical work. When mixed with other blues from the collection it adds warmth to the resulting colours.
Cobalt Blue Deep
Pigments: PB74 (Cobalt Zinc Silicate Blue)
Series Number: 5
Opacity: Semi-Opaque
Lightfastness: Excellent
Cobalt Blue Deep is similar to Cobalt Blue, although it is more red-leaning. It was discovered in 1802 by the French chemist Louis Thénard, who was experimenting with creating an alternative to the expensive pigment Ultramarine, which was made with Lapis Lazuli. Although this paint is the only colour in the set to be labelled semi-opaque, I didn’t find it noticeably more opaque than the other colours in the set. I found it to be one of the thinnest and stickiest colour to handle, which has made the swatch retain all of the brush hairs. This true blue is extremely versatile, and makes a useful pairing with the other almost-primary colours in the set – Bismuth Vanadate and Pyrrole Crimson.
Cosmic Blue
Pigments: PBk11, PB15.1 (Mars Black, Phthalo Blue Red Shade)
Series Number: 2
Opacity: Semi-Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Cosmic Blue appears like a black applied straight from the tube, which disperses into a stormy blue-grey. It feels comparable to a Payne’s Grey, and contains the pigment for Phthalo Blue Red Shade, which is a single pigment paint in the Michael Harding oil range, here combined with Mars Black. This unusual colour name works since the paint does feel like a vast, deep night sky, and can be used to create deeper shades of the other colours in the collection.
Forest Green
Pigments: PBr7, PB15.1 (Brown Iron Oxide, Phthalo Blue Red Shade)
Series Number: 2
Opacity: Semi-Transparent
Lightfastness: Excellent
Forest Green is a mixed pigment paint, which is a cool dark pine green. It looks fairly similar to Cosmic Blue when the tubes are sitting next to each other, but isn’t as dark when painted straight from the tube. This dull dark green emulates an overcast forest, and complements the similarly deep but dull Corinthian Purple. This colour would be very useful for landscape work and can be warmed up with a strong yellow like Hansa Yellow Medium to create brighter, but still natural greens.
Glazing the Colours
Since all of the paints in the Brecon Beacons collection are transparent or semi-transparent apart from Cobalt Blue Deep, I wanted to test glazing each of the colours with these qualities. For the following swatches, I worked over an acrylic underpainting in Burnt Sienna on a sheet from a Jackson’s Oil Paper Block, since it provided a neutral base.
As you can see, each of the colours appear highly pigmented and smooth. As a collection of colours, the Brecon Beacons set provides a myriad of options for glazing, which can be multiplied when you start mixing the colours together. This makes the set a great choice for those who want a complete collection of colours to test out transparency and thin layering in their paintings.
Mixing the Colours
Next, I tested mixing together colours from the collection to show the variety of palette you could achieve with the set. On the sheet, I’ve noted the colours that I combined to create each swatch. My favourites were the rich purple from combining Imperial Purple and Cobalt Blue Deep, the brilliant orange made from Amber and Bismuth Vanadate, and the chilli pepper red of Hansa Yellow Medium and Perrindo Maroon.
The Michael Harding Brecon Beacons oil colour collection provides oil painters with 10 highly chromatic and versatile transparent and semi-transparent colours, for expanding their palettes and increasing the glazing options in their kits. The ‘substitute’ colours for Cadmium Red and Yellow also make this a great set for anyone concerned about the toxicity of their oil paints.
Watch Michael Harding Introduce the Brecon Beacons Oil Colours
Further Reading
Michael Harding Introduces the Brecon Beacons Oil Colours
Michael Harding Introduces His 10 New Oil Colours
