Raw Titanium is a less processed form of titanium white pigment and is sometimes marketed as unbleached titanium or titanium buff. Titanium pigment begins manufacture in a black powder form and is progressively lightened using different bleaching processes until it is pure white. Raw titanium is characterized by a yellowish brown colour because it is not fully bleached out. This beige colour is particularly convenient in portraiture as a base for blending skin tones.
Using Raw Titanium produces very opaque blends and tends to give the paint surface an unusual enamel like appearance. The flow properties (which are how the paint feels and behaves when spread around or manipulated) are very smooth and fluid.
This form of titanium is very useful for colour mixing, especially when using a muted or “historical” palette by making it possible to make clean modern pigments appear more like their historical counterparts. For example sample #19, a tint of the traditional pigment cerulean, is similar in hue to sample #18; a blend of phthalo blue with raw titanium, whereas phthalo blue blended with titanium white, (sample# 17) is quite different. Traditional mineral pigments are expensive and not always readily available – using blends of modern pigments with raw titanium is a very economical alternative.
Blending with raw titanium is a very effective and convenient way of reducing the saturation level of a colour (making colours duller) in a very precise and subtle way. Samples #4 through #12 show how easy it is to make light, desaturated colours by simply adding single colours to raw titanium.
Modulating a colour using darker earthtone pigments to create colour matches or precise shades often results in overshooting and backtracking. Using raw titanium as an alternative way to desaturate colours is especially economical when working with small quantities of paint. Trying to match these colours using titanium white and dull pigments such as raw sienna and raw umber do not produce the same end results as shown in examples #14 and #16. The subtleties in colour that a white pigment can give to a coloured pigment in a mix can be very difficult if not impossible to match in any other way.