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Today I’m examining my absolute favourite colour on the colour wheel: turquoise! I’ll compare two hues of green-blue paint, Teal and Cobalt Turquoise acrylic paint. Both are mixes of various pigments, and while similar hues can be mixed using green and blue, if you like the colours, it can be nice to have a tube of teal or turquoise, just for convenience. I’ll test out how each colour mixes with some common paint colours, and see which one you might want to add to your acrylic artist’s paint palette.
The colour turquoise is named after the stone, although it doesn’t use it as a source pigment, nor is it a particularly specific shade. It can be used for any paint that has a bit of both blue and green in it. It’s a very popular shade for ocean scenes.
Teal
I quite like Golden Paint’s Teal. I’ve used it extensively, particularly a few years ago. It always feels pleasing to me to add some of it to a painting. Their version of teal includes three different pigments:
- PW6 – titanium white
- PB 15:3 – Phthalo blue (green shade)
- PG7 – Phthalo green (blue shade)
Since it includes some titanium white, it’s a relatively light value straight out of the tube and very opaque. Knowing the pigments means you can mix your own using the two phthalos mentioned above, if you’re looking for a darker version. It’s relatively affordable for an artist-quality paint. It falls somewhere in the lower half of the price range of Golden paints.
Cobalt turquoise
Also in the blue-green paint family is cobalt turquoise from Golden Paint. I have occasionally used it as a convenience turquoise as well. Straight out of the tube, it’s much darker than the teal, and fairly opaque, although not quite as much as the teal. It uses a single pigment: PB 36, also known as oxides of cobalt and chromium. This tube of paint is very pricey – not the most expensive of Golden’s paints, but close to the top.
Colour mixing tests
I used the following paint colours as part of this mixing test:
- Hansa yellow lemon
- Cadmium-free yellow medium
- Cadmium-free red medium
- Quinacridone magenta
- Ultramarine blue
- Phthalo blue (green shade)
- Dioxazine purple
- Cadmium orange
- Titanium white
Watch me test colour mixes with teal and cobalt turquoise on my YouTube channel.
Final thoughts
Ultimately I will probably use these two tubes of paint up, and then see how relying on phthalo blue works instead of these two. Especially since the tube of teal is just each of the two shades of phthalo blue plus titanium white. It’d give me more flexibility to have darker hues and would be less expensive than buying a standalone teal paint. The cobalt turquoise is nice as well. I do find both really pleasing to use straight out of the tube, so it’s definitely possible that I’ll end up buying one of these colours again.
Learn more
Check out a listing of all my colour mixing blog posts and videos on my colour mixing roundup article.
Get your own
Pick up some teal or cobalt turquoise acrylic paint at your local art supply shop or on Amazon:
US
Canada
