From Burnt Umber to Raw Sienna- Names of Earth Tones

The names for earth tones in paint are a bit of a wild west. Unfortunately this is an area where pigment codes only help a little but not a lot.

Many different looking brown earths are categorized under just one banner for a pigment code: most are labeled PBr7.

There is an unwritten cannon for what a given name means within the world of paints. It's interesting because painters also come to expect certain attributes from certain paint names.

Here we swatched paints from the major names within PBr7.

• Raw Sienna- Tends to be a peanut butter color, usually has a yellow-orangish note. Old versions of this color actually came from Sienna Italy and had some transparency.
• Burnt Sienna- A rich chocolate brown (a little redder than milk chocolate) with a red-orange undertone. May be a bit rosy in tints. In the old days this color had a fiery transparency.
• Burnt Umber- A dark chocolate brown. Some modern versions are warm and some are cool. Use this one with care though as umbers can cause something called "sinking in".
• Raw Umber- A deep low chroma brown that lacks the little bit of warmth that Burnt Umber has. In other words, slightly cooler than Burnt Umber. Old versions of this color sound like the stuff of legends. More about them in the article.
• Green Umber- Exceptionally cool umbers, sometimes with something that could almost be greenish about them. Some modern green umbers are a tepid swamp water color, which is actually quite useful, and some are deep neutral umbers-- also exceedingly helpful.
• Misc Umbers- There are a lot of other umbers out there which go by different names. Umber can be a bit of an umbrella term for earths.

More can be found in the article on Brown Oxides, PBr7.

Happy Painting!