Yellow Ocher

Ocher, the oldest color of landscape

Ocher earth has accompanied the artistic work of man since cave paintings and on a model it still works the same way: it brings warmth and light into terrain. A gray rock with an ocher glaze stops being a stone backdrop and starts to look like sandstone dried out by summer. The same pigment makes dust on a dirt road, scorched grass by an embankment, a drift of sand by water and the sticky layer on the wheels of a vehicle that has driven along a soil roadway.

Where ocher finds a use

• Brightening the tops of rocks and the edges the sun touches.
• A dusty layer along roads, turnouts and crossings.
• Dried-out grass and stubble above darker soil.
• An underpainting beneath sand scatter on the bank of a stream.

Properties

It is a water-mixable non-toxic preparation, which once dry can be dissolved again and adjusted. The bases given for it are absorbent, that is cast as well as modeled plaster, plaster cloth, wood, paper pulp and shaped foam. The volume of the package is 118 ml.

In the work the opposite rule holds than with dark shades: ocher is applied from the top down and above all onto the projecting surfaces, because that is where light falls and dust settles in nature. As little as possible belongs in the crevices, as otherwise the texture is optically leveled. Anyone who wants a soft transition keeps a dish of clean water beside them and washes the edge of the glaze into it at once, while it has not yet joined with the base. Ocher also stands up to mixing with the darker tones of the same line; a few drops of brown turn it into soil, while a drop of gray turns it into faded stone in the sun.