Paint review: Winsor & Newton AOC Cobalt Violet Dark

Brand loyalty is a funny thing. I freely admit to being a snob, but I would never think of myself as a brand snob. Yet I have huge loyalty to particular paints. Whilst this is partly down to the practicalities of having learned a particular paint, it is also in part snobbery - an irrational belief that one brand is best. Those of you who have been paying attention may have worked out that last time round I was Michael Harding man and I still am.

One thing that being away from art taught me is that there is no universal best, only best for a particular set of criteria. So recently I have made it my business to find out about alternative sources of paint and I have several interesting things on order. The first to arrive is the now discontinued Winsor & Newton Artists Oil Colour Cobalt Violet Dark.

W&N is a brand I have largely ignored. Their ubiquity makes them easy to dismiss; it is natural to assume a small atelier full of craftsman will make a better product than a factory. There is also a temptation to see them as old fashioned, doing exactly the same thing for decades and yet isn't the use of traditional techniques key to the way Harding, Old Holland et al promote themselves? W&N have fiercely loyal clientele, but again this is easy to dismiss as the ones who shout about it tend not to be very "Alan", for better or for worse. This loyalty speaks volumes though and begs an interesting question - when it comes to raw materials should one prioritise absolute quality of product or consistency between batches and reliability of supply?

All things considered, when I stumbled across a chap selling this paint at £4.75 for 21ml versus an RRP of £42 for 40ml of Harding's I thought it worth a punt. After all, he particularly states that this particular paint is the equal of the Harding and Mussini equivalents in appearance and handling. It uses the same pigment Cobalt Phosphate PV14 but in safflower oil. It seems to me a non-yellowing oil like safflower is critical for a purple in spite of its darkness as yellow is the complementary colour of purple - any yellowing will therefore lead to a greying and de-saturating of the colour so I'm pleased they avoided linseed.

First impressions are awesome!

What a colour. This is the archetypal regal purple. This is the colour Cadbury's wrappers dream about at night. It is truly imperial.

Second impressions are pretty good too! Smeared on the palette the colour is clean, even and bright. Consistency is soft and smooth and it forms nice peaks on the palette which bodes well for brush marks. It claims to be and seems to be semi-transparent too, with good enough covering power when required. Mixed with white it is strong enough but immediately controllable - it doesn't feel like it will overly dominate in the way that say a pthalocyanine will. Mixed with a couple of other colours it is doing what I'd hoped - yellow ochre produces a rich but subtle mustard-brown a lot like our clay and this mixture with a lot of white and a touch of blue is a good starting point for the smooth, young tree trunks round here. The mix I'm really excited about is optical though - a brushed out and scumbled combination with umbers and ultramarine for the rainbow-coloured black mud that characterises the wooded parts of the riverbank; a treacherous but fertile mix of rotted leaves and silt. I've been underpainting with a thin wash of vermillion that lets the canvas glow through like a watercolour, then applying these colours grunge-ily over the top.

As far as mark making and brush strokes are concerned, I'm not the ideal person to ask as I rarely go near impasto and I'm not interested perfectly smooth areas of transition or flat colour. The relatively thick marks I have made have held their shape well enough, though at only a millimetre or so off the surface of the canvas I haven't been demanding. Equally, in areas where I have tried to brush my marks out the paint has responded well. It seems happy enough blending wet-in-wet too.

The only thing I'm not quite comfortable with is that it feels different to the Harding's I'm used to. Under the brush it is a little softer and squidgier. That's not a bad thing from my point of view but it may have implications for very thick brush marks where the painter requires every bristle mark to stand proud.

Overall I'm very pleased. On first encounter this appears to be a very competent paint in a spectacular but versatile colour and I hope as I learn how to use it it will seem better and better. It has been a very pleasant surprise.