The Palette/brown/Made in a lab or a works
Bistre
Boiled soot from a wood fire: the drawing ink of Rembrandt and Claude, and it fades to nothing given a window.
- Hex
- #3D2B1F
- RGB
- 61, 43, 31
- First used
- Medieval; standard for drawing from the 15th to 18th century
- From
- Europe, wherever there was a chimney
What it is
Water-soluble tars and organic matter from wood soot, chiefly beechwood.
How it is made
Soot is scraped from a chimney, boiled in water, the insoluble carbon allowed to settle out, and the brown liquid above it kept and concentrated. What you are using is the soluble tar fraction, not the carbon, which is precisely why it is brown rather than black, and also why it is unstable.
The quality depended on the wood. Beech was preferred. Resinous softwood gave a poorer, greasier product, and the variability of what came out of any given chimney is one reason old drawing inks vary so much in colour.
Bistre, Dark brown color. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Bistre was the standard brown wash ink for European drawing for roughly four hundred years, and the drawings made with it are among the best things in Western art: Rembrandt's landscape and figure studies, Claude's wash drawings, Guercino, Poussin.
It is also comprehensively fugitive, which is why those drawings live in solander boxes in the dark and are shown for a few weeks at a time behind glass with the lux levels measured. The reason a print room makes you ask for things by appointment is largely this pigment.
It was replaced by sepia in the late eighteenth century, and then by synthetic pigments, and it is now essentially unobtainable commercially. You can make it yourself in an afternoon with a chimney brush and a saucepan, which is more than can be said for most historical colours.
Where it is used
Pen and wash drawing, almost exclusively. It was never much used as a paint because it has no body.
Its real interest is as a reminder that the drawings we treat as the most spontaneous and immediate things in art history were made in an unstable medium and are visibly less than they were. What survives of a working drawing is not what the person in the room saw.
Go and look at it
Rembrandt's landscape drawings
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; British Museum, London
Ask at the print room. Note the light levels they show them at, and why.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Water-soluble tars and organic matter from wood soot, chiefly beechwood.
- Opacity
- Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
- Lightfastness
- Fugitive. It leaves. Work made with it is already less than it was.
- Fades badly. Drawings made with it are kept in the dark and exhibited under strict light limits.
- Hygroscopic. It can go tacky in humidity.
- Composition depends entirely on what wood was burnt.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #3D2B1F
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 61, 43, 31
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 24°, 33%, 18%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 30, 49, 76
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 19, 6, 11
- Perceptual. L* of 19 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Bistre is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 24°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
13.43:1 · AAA
Handgloves
Black on it
1.56:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on paper
12.75:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on ink
1.36:1 · Fails
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
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Foundations · Colour·brown·Made in a lab or a works