Most painters fix a wrong skin tone with another tube. My skin comes from the same five, and each one has a job.

Light and dark skin sit in the same narrow slice of the color wheel. The real work is on two other dials - value and chroma.

How copper acetoarsenite became the most exciting and most dangerous green on the Victorian palette, and what the modern tube labelled "Emerald Green" actually contains.

What Van Gogh's sunflowers can teach you about a pigment that lies in slow motion.

It disappeared from every palette around 1750, and nobody noticed for almost two centuries - here is what it actually does in oil and why it matters now.