The Pigment Notebook!

We are so excited to announce that we've released a brand new feature to Paint List--The Pigment Notebook!

As many of you know, several years ago, we had to escape an actual urban wildfire. And one of the first things we saved in our evacuation was this book-- one of the handwritten volumes of what we call the Great Book of Color.

You can now search for a given pigment by its common name or the pigment code. We also made a video about how to find that the pigment code on your paint tubes.

Among the many artists whose work we admire, we've found that relatively few of them understand pigment codes. Those little letters and numbers are a secret boon for artists, and part of why we wanted to make Paint List in the first place was to help painters search for paint across brands by using pigment codes.

All painters can benefit from knowing about pigments, and this information is frankly too good not to share. There are a lot of good pigment resources out there— The Pigment Notebook will focus on how pigments apply to painters.

The information shared over on the Pigment Notebook is only partial (the pages are abbreviated), and is it far from perfect. It's a constant work in progress, so if you come across errors do let us know.

And, of course, some of the most interesting information is not technical— it comes from listening to the legends of the painters. Perhaps some people don't have time for legends. But we do, because there is no substitute for hearing about how these pigments work in practice. There is also no substitute for one's own experience gleaned over years of painting.

With the legends, we like to pair both research and experience, and we hope that it may inspire you to get to know your palette like never before.