Cadmium Pigments - Artists Paints

Artists Paints

Brilliantly colored, with good permanence and tinting power, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange, and Cadmium Red are familiar artist colors, as well as being frequently employed as architectural paints, since they can add life and vibrancy to renderings. Their greatest use is in the coloring of plastics and specialty paints which must resist processing or service temperatures up to 3000°C. The color-fastness or permanence of cadmium requires protection from a tendency to slowly form carbonate salts with exposure to air. Most paint vehicles accomplish this, but cadmium colors will fade in fresco or mural painting.

Cadmium sulfide and a mixture of cadmium sulfide with cadmium selenide are commonly used as pigments in artists' paints. They have an excellent reputation for color permanence although this is partially based on two reasons which are not necessarily directly related to their properties:

1. when introduced, there were hardly any stable pigments in the yellow to red range, especially orange and bright red was very troublesome, when the cadmium pigments replaced e.g. mercury sulfide (the original vermilion), the light-fastness was greatly improved,
2. companies sell the cadmium-containing paints at premium price. Although the pigments are certainly more expensive, the premium price is often not fully justifiable, with reasons more in the marketing area than in the actual raw material cost.