REVIEW: Winsor & Newton 8-Color Revival Collection

The Winsor & Newton’s Revival Collection recreates colors used by Masters of the past. These were colors that were fugitive and/or unhealthy for the artist. They’ve been reformulated to be more permanent, and safer to use.

This is a set for those who like to explore, who want to work with secondary triads, recreate the look of past masters, or simply want to expand the range of colors they currently use.

Including three secondary colors—orange, purple, two greens, and a yellow, and three greys, the Winsor & Newton Revival Collection is a unique set of colors that work together in amazing ways. Each color would also work well individually with other color sets.

Coming in a standard black, metal tin with mixing fold out, and removable tray, there are 8 half pans, leaving space to add 16 more half-pans so you can easily add them to colors you already have.

I like to have space between my half-pans. I will add some more colors eventually, but this is what I’ve done with the palette for now. I might add empty pans to fill with water for making mixes of colors. Meanwhile, the space helps keep my colors uncontaminated from splashes.

You can buy these colors in 5 ml and 14 ml tubes, or half pans.

The Colors

If you remember from your RYB color wheel, when you mix two of the primary colors from Red, Yellow, and Blue, you get the secondary colors Orange, Green, and Purple. With a yellow to extend the range of the orange, and three greys for neutrals, you are encouraged to look at your subjects in a new way and experiment.

LF=Lightfastness, Permanence is Lightfastness plus the durability of binders used in the paint. Some of these colors only have a Permanence rating. Information taken from the Winsor & Newton website.

Aureolin Hue

• PBr7/PY151
• Semi-Transparent
• LF=Excellent
• Extremely Permanent

True Aureolin (PY40, aka Cobalt Yellow) is a beautiful bright yellow – to begin with. It doesn’t fade so much as it turns grayish. Some of you might cringe at the word ‘hue’, as that often means there are cheap fillers or dyes. 

This new Aureolin Hue is a high-grade ‘hue’. A bright yellow that will stay that way for a long time.

The original color was popular with Turner and van Gogh for painting sunlight.

Field’s Orange 

• PO67
• Semi-Transparent
• LF Unlisted
• Permanent

Do you know the word ‘levigated’? A fancy way of saying that a paint (or other substance) has been reduced to a fine powder or smooth paste.

The original color was specially ‘levigated’ by George Field in 1835 to resemble the colors found in the works of Titian and Rubens, and it’s featured in Queen Victoria’s Watercolour box.

It’s a single pigment orange vermillion – very powerful and dominating as red’s and orange’s tend to be. 

Field’s version held up well, but he never divulged the formula and the color was lost to artists when he died. Now we have Winsor & Newton’s version of the color.

If you want a color that conveys heat, look no further.  In mixes, it warms up the other colors and gives them a glow.

Viridian Hue

• PG7/PY42/PY43
• Transparent
• LF=Excellent
• Permanent

Viridian is a transparent emerald green color. Viridian Hue closely matches genuine Viridian. It mixes beautifully with yellow, orange or red to give you an amazing range of natural greens.

If you are familiar with the color, you know it isn’t the strongest color on its own. Surprisingly, it is stronger when mixed with other colors. It creates lovely bluish-grey mixes and light to dark greys. 

While you may not use this color alone very often, it’s extremely handy to have in your paintbox.

Cinnabar Green

7-Cinnabar

• PG36/PY138
• Transparent
• LF Unlisted
• Extremely Permanent

A bright, yellow-green, Cinnabar is another great mixer but one that stands very well on its own. The original color was one of the greens made with copper tartrate or copper arsenic – which are not exactly safe for the artist.

This new version is as robust as the original, a great mixer, extremely permanent, and safe to use!

Tyrian Purple 

• PR202/PV37
• Transparent
• LF Unlisted
• Moderately Durable

Purple was one of the most difficult colors to create, and this version is based on the dye created in Tyre, Phoenicia, during the Bronze Age. It required 12,000 Murex mollusks to yield just 1.5 grams and was time-consuming to produce, and is probably the most expensive color ever made. Winsor & Newton’s version is relatively less expensive and no mollusks are harmed in its creation.

This newer version is only rated as moderately durable, so not to be used for a professional work or a gift, but a beautiful purple to play with otherwise.

The color ranges from a pale purplish-pink to a deep, dark almost black.  It mixes well even with its complementary yellow.

Ultramarine Ash

• PB29/PG23
• Transparent
• LF=Excellent
• Permanent
• Granulating

I have to tell you that Ultramarine Ash is my favorite color in this set. You may wonder why when I mention it’s a low-tinting, low-intensity color, and it tends to be streaky if you don’t use enough water.  But, oh such a beautiful warm, soft blue, and yet it conveys depth and movement due to the streaking and granulating qualities.

If you’ve struggled to produce lovely whites this is a perfect shadow color. It creates dynamic clouds, and objects in the distance. It is gracious in mixes—letting the other color dominate, simply deepening and changing the tone of that color.

The original color made from the inferior grades of lapis lazuli, and was traditionally used for tinting.

Mineral Grey

• PB29/PBk19/PW5
• Semi-Transparent
• LF=Excellent
• Permanent
• Granulating

Mineral Grey is a cooler grey with a slight greenish tinge. Still low-tinting it is bit stronger and less streaky than Ultramarine Ash, but it does granulate. To my eye, Ultramarine Ash would work for clouds on a sunny day, where Mineral Grey would make great storm clouds. Another good choice for sharing whites with a cooler tone—whites in shadow or standing against that stormy sky, perhaps.

It also lets other colors dominate in mixes, and implies objects in the distance.

Ostwald Grey

• PBk6/PW5/PY42
• Opaque
• LF=Excellent
• Permanent
• Granulating 

Ostwald Grey is extremely dominant, just a few steps away from black. On its own, used aggressively it creates a flat, dark color. In mixes, it creates beautiful, moody darks. 

A great color for toning—that is, darkening a  color to the value level you want. 

Besides, working well to tone your colors in a painting, it’s a great tool for experimenting and learning how to get the tonal values you want in mixes.

It’s a granulating color, so it also adds some texture.

Packaging

The tin is the standard metal tin with room for 24 half-pans (even though it only comes with 8 colors). It has mixing spaces in the lid, and a fold-out section for more mixing. It’s all black except for the Winsor & Newton logo.

It has a lift-out tray with metal tabs for keeping the pans in place.

Each pan comes wrapped in a label that has all the information that you would get with a tube paint, plus under that the pan is wrapped in plastic to protect the paint during shipping.

The pans themselves have the name of the paint, which is nice. I usually write this on pans with a permanent marker and it’s nice when I don’t have to. Paints often look the same in their dried form, so f the paints are ever knocked out of the palette, this feature makes it easy to know what color is which.

The palette comes in a cardboard box that has all sorts of information on the back, as well as showing the eight colors. Since the tin is similar to many others I have, I intend to keep it in the box so I can find it more easily later. You may or may not want to keep it.

This set includes a blank swatch sheet. I took mine outside to do some painting before I scanned it in, and watched it blow away in the wind. It has spaces for 24 color swatches, so you could use those to show some mixes, or use them for colors you add to the pan.

My Examples

For my first example painting, I kept the color fairly pure, with just a little glazing for shadow so you could see how the colors worked together. I used the Ultramarine Ash for the misty sky in the background with the Mineral Grey for barely seen trees. Ostwald Grey was used for the glimpses of tree trunks among the foliage.

For my second example, I focused on mixing the colors to create beautiful darks, and shading the whites with the greys. You can see where my abstracts above helped with this painting, and Koi fish are an awesome subject for secondary colors. 

There is an Asian legend about determination and persistence – a koi that was determined to climb to the top of a waterfall, despite being told he could not. Again and again he failed, until one day he finally succeeded. The gods were impressed and turned the Koi into a dragon.

After painting the koi, a dragon seemed like a good choice for my last example. Even, though my koi was orange and white, I’ve wanted to paint a dragon with the coloring of a mahogany bay horse for a while, and this set was perfect for the color.  

I also focused on those clouds to show you what the Ultramarine Ash can do. At the bottom, the Mineral Grey was used as smoke from the dragon’s breath.   

Mixes of orange and purple, and orange, purple and yellow were used for the bay coloring.

The darker colors of the wings, spines, inner neck, and shading were mixes of Ostwald Grey, Green, and Purple.

What To Buy?

You can purchase this set on Amazon

Links of Interest

DOODLEWASH REVIEW: Winsor & Newton 

Disclaimer
I received this Revival Collection 8 Half Pan Set from Winsor & Newton for the purposes of this review. I received no other considerations, though this post may contain affiliate links which help support Doodlewash. As always, all opinions expressed are my own.