At PIGMENT TOKYO, you can purchase special kinds of pigments that are difficult to find in normal art supply stores. In particular, we currently carry more than fourteen types of effect pigments.

Effect pigments are pearlescent or glitter pigments that create visual effects on painted surfaces, which are mainly made with mica and glass as core materials.

However, the effect pigments that are commercially available to the public are very limited because these pigments are usually manufactured for mass-produced industrial products or the printing industry.

In PIGMENT TOKYO, we sell a variety of effect pigments from 15g in order to make them available for individual artists to experiment with the colors.

Moreover, if you visit our store, there is a PIGMENT TOKYO's original color sample book of the effect pigments. These color patches allow you to see the polarized and glitter effects caused by light hitting the particles from different angles, which are hard to be presented through pictures or the laptop display.

 In this article, I am going to introduce the [Py] series.

Like the previously introduced "Metashine" series, the color of this series changes dramatically on black backgrounds. The particles of pigments are made of natural mica as the core and are coated with specially developed titanium dioxide around it.

First, let's take a look at these pigments when they are in the bottles.

 

At first glance, these pigments look just white but by changing the color of your background to black, the colors appear differently as shown below. Although these glitter pigments are often painted on a black surface, you could express these highly transparent effect pigments in their full potential by painting on a dark substrate.

These are four popular colors among the [Py] series.

(*T40-25 SW Turquoise is out of stock as of November 2022.)

【Art Materials Used】 

Colors: [Py]T30-01 Royal Damask // [Py]T40-24 SW Color Space Green // [Py] T40-25 SW Turquoise // [Py] T30-00 Pacific Lagoon //

Acrylic Paint Ivory Black

Binder: Acrylic Emulsion

Substrate: Bamboo Washi Paper for Watercolor

What makes these pigments so unique is the silkiness of their color.  It has a soft shimmer, like silk, rather than shiny large pieces of glitter. It can create a quiet atmosphere like an illuminated snowy landscape.

Moreover, this series is suitable for spray paint because it will produce vibrant color effects with a thin layer of a minimum amount of pigment applied. Since its quality is designed for industrial purposes, the paint coat is highly durable.

By adding black paint to the pigments, I could obtain a different effect from painting on a black surface. For example, these are how the colors appeared.

【Art Materials Used】 

Colors: [Py] T30-01 Royal Damask // [Py] T40-24 SW Color Space Green // [Py] T40-25 SW Turquoise // [Py]T30-00 Pacific Lagoon //

Acrylic Paint Ivory Black

Binder: Holbein Gel Medium

Substrate: Bamboo Washi Paper for Watercolor

I added a little Matsuda acrylic paint to the water-based acrylic gel medium.

This gel medium is highly transparent, therefore, if I use acrylic emulsion instead, I can create a slightly opaque paint compared to the gel medium.

I also added a pigment dispersant agent because these effect pigments did not blend well with the water-based binders due to their lightweight and strong surface tension.

The color palette is closer to gray tones, somewhere in between when they had white and black backgrounds. Since the black paint is mixed well with the pigments and there is no transparency unlike when they were painted on a back base, this is what makes the result so mesmerizing.

For this article, I glued the papers to a curved surface to take the photo of the color samples from above but when I took them on a flat surface from a certain angle, the colors turned out as below. It is very interesting to see how the effect pigments change their colors by viewing from different angles.

【Art Materials Used】 

Colors: [Py] T30-01 Royal Damask // [Py] T40-24 SW Color Space Green // [Py] T40-25 SW Turquoise // [Py] T30-00 Pacific Lagoon //

Acrylic Paint Ivory Black

Binder: Holbein Gel Medium

Substrate: Bamboo Washi Paper for Watercolor

Compared to when the light is shined from above on a curved surface, the pigments appear to show more original colors here. The main characteristic of this painting material is even though it is the same pigment, its color appears differently depending on the angle of view. 

This unique feature of the effect pigments allows artists to customize them in various ways, such as using white tones as they are or adjusting amounts of black paint to add.

Since they have a small particle size, it was easy to handle while making the color samples. Therefore, there would be no worries even if it is your first time using them and I hope you will find your own unique way to use these effect pigments too!

Translated by Atsumi Okano and Nelson Hor Ee Herng

PIGMENT TOKYO Art Materials Experts