The Palette/yellow/Dug out of the ground
Yellow ochre
The dull, free, indispensable yellow: in every cave painting, every flesh tone, and every convincing landscape ever painted.
Also called goethite · raw sienna's cousin · yellow earth · ramraj
- Hex
- #CC7722
- RGB
- 204, 119, 34
- Pigment index
- PY43
- First used
- At least 40,000 years, probably much longer
- From
- Every continent. Roussillon in France and Cyprus were the famous sources.
What it is
Hydrated iron oxide, mostly goethite (FeO(OH)), in clay. Drive off the water with heat and it turns into red ochre.
How it is made
Dig, dry, grind, wash. The washing is the only real skill: you suspend the ground earth in water, let the coarse grit settle for a few seconds, pour the still-cloudy water into a second vessel, and let the fine pigment settle out of that. Levigation, and the same method produces every earth pigment in this library.
Roasting it converts the goethite to haematite and takes it red. Every ochre producer has known this for tens of thousands of years, so a single deposit gives you two colours plus everything in between depending on how hot you go, which is a remarkably sophisticated thing to be doing with a fire.
Yellow ochre, Earth pigment of characteristic colour. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Ochre is not one colour, it is a family, and the family covers most of what a painter actually needs: yellow earth, red earth, brown earth, and the transparent versions. It is in the oldest paintings in Australia, Africa, Europe and Indonesia. The 45,000-year-old pig painted on a cave wall in Sulawesi is ochre.
The Roussillon deposits in Provence produced ochre industrially into the twentieth century and the hills there are still that colour. The quarries are open to walk through. Cyprus gave its name to the umbers. The trade was real and international long before industrial pigments.
What kept it in use after brighter yellows existed is its behaviour rather than its brightness. Ochre is opaque, absolutely permanent, dries well, and (this is the part that matters) it is a dull yellow, which means it can stand in for light without pretending to be a light source. Nothing bright can do that. A field of wheat painted in cadmium yellow looks like a field of plastic.
Where it is used
Everything. Flesh, earth, stone, straw, hair, distance, the ground layer under a painting, and the mixing yellow in almost every palette that has ever produced a convincing daylight.
In brand and interface terms, ochre is the colour that reads as warm without reading as an alert. Yellow in a UI is almost always a warning, because the bright yellows are what warnings use. An ochre is not. It reads as paper, as age, as something physical. This library's own paper colour is in that family for exactly that reason.
Go and look at it
The Sulawesi cave paintings
Leang Tedongnge and nearby caves, Indonesia, in situ
Around 45,000 years old and among the oldest figurative art known. Ochre.
The ochre quarries of Roussillon
Luberon, Provence, France
You can walk through the workings. The whole village is built and rendered in the colour it sits on.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Hydrated iron oxide, mostly goethite (FeO(OH)), in clay. Drive off the water with heat and it turns into red ochre.
- Opacity
- Opaque. It covers what is under it.
- Lightfastness
- Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.
- Absolutely permanent, chemically inert, compatible with every medium including fresco.
- Turns red when heated, so one deposit yields a whole warm range.
- Cheap enough that there is no reason to use a substitute.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #CC7722
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 204, 119, 34
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 30°, 71%, 47%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 42, 83, 20
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 58, 27, 57
- Perceptual. L* of 58 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Yellow ochre 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 30°
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
3.37:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
Black on it
6.23:1 · AA
Handgloves
It on paper
3.20:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
It on ink
5.42:1 · AA
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.
Watch
Titles and channels as YouTube reports them
Read more, elsewhere
Colours next to this one
Back up
Foundations · Colour·yellow·Dug out of the ground