The Palette/black/Made in a lab or a works
Payne's grey
Not a pigment but a recipe: a blue-black mixed instead of used, named after a watercolourist, and the best argument for never using black.
- Hex
- #536878
- RGB
- 83, 104, 120
- First used
- Late 18th century
- From
- England
What it is
A mixture. Traditionally ultramarine or indigo with a black and often a red; modern tubes vary by manufacturer and no two match.
How it is made
It is made by mixing, which is the point. William Payne, a late eighteenth-century English watercolourist and drawing master, taught a way of making darks from blue and warm pigments rather than from black, and the mixture took his name. It is a technique that got turned into a product.
Because it is a recipe rather than a compound, every manufacturer's version is different: some use ultramarine and bone black, some phthalo and umber, some add a red. If you have ever wondered why your Payne's grey does not match a friend's, that is why.
Payne's grey, Colour of paint. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Payne was teaching a solution to a specific problem: a black shadow kills a watercolour, because a wash of black over a colour deadens it and cannot be recovered. A blue-grey shadow with some warmth in it darkens the passage while keeping it alive.
It is the pigment equivalent of a design token. A decision somebody made once, named, and distributed so other people could use it without re-deriving it. Like a token, it saves work and hides the reasoning, and people end up using it without knowing what it is for. A great many watercolours are grey where they should be coloured because Payne's grey was in the box.
The underlying principle is the important part and it is worth stating plainly: build your darks from your colours. A shadow is not the absence of a colour, it is the colour under less light and with more of the sky's blue bouncing into it. That is true in paint, in photography, in film grading and on a screen, and it is the single most common thing beginners get wrong in all four.
Where it is used
Watercolour shadows, skies, architectural rendering and any grey that needs to stay alive. Also the default 'shading grey' in a lot of illustration.
For interface and brand work the equivalent question is what your greys are made of. A neutral grey scale generated by desaturating black is flat and always looks slightly cheap; a grey scale built with a consistent hue bias (a few degrees towards the brand colour) reads as designed. It is the same move Payne was teaching, two hundred and thirty years later.
Go and look at it
British watercolour architectural drawing
V&A and RIBA collections, London
The shadows are blue-grey rather than black. That is the whole technique.
How it behaves
- Made of
- A mixture. Traditionally ultramarine or indigo with a black and often a red; modern tubes vary by manufacturer and no two match.
- Opacity
- Semi-opaque. It covers, but something of the layer beneath still comes through.
- Lightfastness
- Good. Safe for anything that is not hung in direct sun for a century.
- Not a pigment. Every brand's version is a different mixture.
- Granulates attractively in watercolour if it contains ultramarine.
- Easy to overuse. It will grey out a whole painting if you let it.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #536878
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 83, 104, 120
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 206°, 18%, 40%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 31, 13, 0, 53
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 43, -4, -11
- Perceptual. L* of 43 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Payne's grey 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 206°
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
5.80:1 · AA
Handgloves
Black on it
3.62:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
It on paper
5.51:1 · AA
Handgloves
It on ink
3.15:1 · Large text only
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
Colours next to this one
Next, in time
Cobalt blue
The clean, cool, slightly dull blue that every glaze and every Impressionist sky is made of.
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Foundations · Colour·black·Made in a lab or a works