Cadmium Orange Deep is a blending of Cadmium Red with Cadmium Orange. Cadmium reds and orange have been used by artists for 90 years and in that time have gained a reputation as the gold standard for these sort of colours. It is a reputation well deserved, especially in the early days when only genuine vermilion could compete on permanence (but at the cost of being very poisonous) and the organic pigments of the day were very much less permanent. In recent times organic pigments like the quinacridones have caught up to the cadmiums in terms of permanence and the pyrroles are at least as good if not ever so slightly more permanent and yet the cadmiums still hold the crown. It is interesting to consider why that would be so. It seems to be due to the fact that while various pigments do catch up in one area they often balance that with an issue in another area. For instance the pyrrole pigments are extremely permanent and are beautiful bright and clean colours and yet they are not so opaque as the cadmiums and sometimes that is important. They are also a little more expensive. Consequently the Cadmiums remain the champion pigments for reds and oranges in the eyes of many artists for their balance of good solid characteristics.
Cadmium Orange Deep is a rich reddish orange of great beauty. Orange as an artist???s colour is one of the unsung heroes on the palette. Most artists don???t realize how much of it they use since they usually do not think of Burnt Sienna as an orange and yet all browns are actually dark oranges. Mixing blue with any orange, including Burnt Sienna, is one of the most efficient ways of producing pleasing greys and related neutrals. In theory any two complimentary???s should produce a similar grey or other neutral. In practice the violet/yellow and red/green neutrals make far less interesting neutrals to orange/blue. With such a wide range of oranges from browns to very bright pure oranges and such a wide range of blues to choose from in both hue and transparency or opacity the artist is spoiled for neutral colours that are applicable for everything from landscape to skin tones. Speaking of skin tones, Cadmium Orange Deep is getting red enough to be useful for making some of the salmony colours found in some skins.