There are some not bad tricks y'all can use to predict how your paint is going to react when you use it. Volition it have roofing power? Will it be transparent?

How To Tell if a Paint is Translucent or Opaque…Merely by looking at information technology!

Some manufacturers effort to list data regarding the physical backdrop of their paint contained in each tube. The pigment information, for instance: pigment py3, pw6 is essential and I would not purchase any paint (for serious artwork) without this on the label. Any reputable brand will e'er report the specific pigments that are used in the paint then serious consumers tin brand informed decisions. Some companies even attempt to draw the pigment's color in terms of its hue/saturation/value, (usually through the munsell color arrangement) and its transparency. I find the transparency information to be limiting, and many brands don't list information technology anyhow so I will teach yous how to tell if your paint is opaque or translucent with a simple exam.

If your paint looks darker when used thicker it is a translucent. The bigger the change in color value when viewing a thicker layer versus a thinner layer the more transparent the paint is. On your palette, when y'all accept your paint squeezed out of the tube into a big dodder, this will be your "thick layer of paint". Now accept your finger, palette knife, or brush and drag a pocket-size corporeality of that pigment out from the clump. Make sure it is a thin layer. If both the thin layer and the thick layer (the clump) look the same, that paint is opaque. If not, if in that location is a value alter and the color looks different, the paint has some degree of translucency.

The reason this works is a result of how light rays collaborate with each type of pigment mixture. In an opaque paint the light rays don't penetrate the paint film and merely reverberate off the surface of the pigment. And so a 1 inch layer of paint looks no different than i/100th of an inch when using opaque paint. In the example of a translucent layer of paint, the light rays penetrate the paint layer much further, oftentimes not stopping until they hit an opaque base layer underneath such as a white ground in which they and so reflect dorsum out. Then when a translucent paint is used in a thick layer, many of the rays are entering deep into the paint flick and getting trapped. If these rays never make information technology back out nosotros have nothing to meet, or less to see…hence the darker colour!

Naught calorie-free rays = darkness.

Can you tell that the cadmium red and the cobalt blue are the opaque colors?
Can you tell that the cadmium red and the cobalt blue are the opaque colors?

This is why thicker layers of translucent paints wait darker. This is also the reason a bright looking coat mixture on a white palette seems to have no effect when painted over darker areas of a painting. Check out the diagram. Cadmium red medium is obviously an opaque color; note how it looks exactly the aforementioned in the large clump or when a thin layer. Pthalo blue and ultramarine blueish are definitely translucent colors. Pthalo practically looks blackness when in a large enough clump. Many light rays are getting trapped in there. Cobalt blueish is one of our more opaque blues, notation how it changes only slightly when viewed as a thick versus thin layer of paint.