The Palette/black/Taken from an animal
Bone black
Charred bone. Warmer and browner than soot black, and the only black most painters will use.
Also called ivory black · bone char · drop black
- Hex
- #241F1C
- RGB
- 36, 31, 28
- Pigment index
- PBk9
- First used
- Antiquity
- From
- Everywhere animals were butchered
What it is
Roughly 10–20% carbon, the rest calcium phosphate from the bone itself.
How it is made
Bones are heated in a closed vessel with no air until the organic matter carbonises, then ground. Because most of the mass is calcium phosphate rather than carbon, bone black is less intensely black than lamp black and has much more body. It is a carbon pigment diluted with bone mineral, which turns out to be exactly what a painter wants.
Ivory black was originally made from ivory and is the same process with a more expensive input. No modern tube of ivory black is ivory; it is bone, and the name is historical.
Bone char has an enormous second industry as a filtration medium. It is used to remove fluoride and heavy metals from water, and historically to decolourise sugar, which is why some refined sugar is not vegan.
Bone black, Chemical compound. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Bone black is the black of European oil painting. Lamp black is colder and more intense but it is a nightmare in oil. It dries extremely slowly and it is so fine that it makes a weak, sinking paint. Bone black has body, dries better, and is a warmer, browner black that sits with flesh and earth colours instead of fighting them.
Manet used it as a colour rather than as an absence, which is the whole argument of his black paintings, a black coat with form and light in it, built from a pigment with enough warmth to hold a highlight. The Impressionists' famous banishing of black from the palette was a reaction against exactly this tradition, and it was reversed within a generation.
Blacks also differ in temperature in a way that is easy to demonstrate and rarely noticed: put bone black, lamp black and a mixed black from phthalo green and alizarin side by side, and the three are obviously different colours. Any brief that just says 'black' has not been written.
Where it is used
Oil and tempera painting, printing ink, filtration, and sugar refining. Also the traditional base for many cosmetics.
The practical point for design work is to stop treating black as one thing. On a screen, pure #000000 against a light interface is harsh and reads as a hole, and every careful design system uses a warm or cool near-black instead. That instinct is the same one that put bone black rather than lamp black on a painter's palette, and it has been the right answer for four hundred years.
Go and look at it
Manet's blacks
Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Courtauld, London
A black coat with form in it. The pigment is warm enough to take a highlight without turning grey.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Roughly 10–20% carbon, the rest calcium phosphate from the bone itself.
- Opacity
- Semi-opaque. It covers, but something of the layer beneath still comes through.
- Lightfastness
- Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.
- Warmer and browner than carbon black, and much better behaved in oil.
- Less intensely black, because most of it is bone mineral rather than carbon.
- Modern 'ivory black' is bone black. The name is historical only.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #241F1C
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 36, 31, 28
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 23°, 13%, 13%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 14, 22, 86
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 12, 2, 3
- Perceptual. L* of 12 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Bone black 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 23°
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
16.31:1 · AAA
Handgloves
Black on it
1.29:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on paper
15.48:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on ink
1.12:1 · 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.
Read more, elsewhere
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Foundations · Colour·black·Taken from an animal