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Single pigment Gray Titanium is a mid-tone warm gray with slightly yellow undertones, and is semi-transparent, granulating, non-staining and has excellent lightfastness. The color and granulation make it wonderfully useful for dusty desert animals such as deer, elephants and tortoises, and for birds whose feathers offer good camouflage for blending into dry woodland, savanna and desert like the roadrunner and burrowing owl. In landscapes, granulating Gray Titanium is beautiful for trees and shrubs whose trunks, branches and twigs are light colored and textured. Urban landscapes benefit from Gray Titanium as well with light washes suggesting concrete structures. As a single pigment, Gray Titanium mixes wonderfully with other colors adding both warmth and softness due to its semi-transparent/semi-opaque characteristic.
As a single pigment, Gray Titanium mixes wonderfully with other colors, adding both warmth and softness due to its semi-transparent/semi-opaque characteristic. Gray Titanium both lightens and neutralizes the colors it’s mixed with.
You can see the lightening and neutralizing in this mixing grid painted with Gray Titanium and the DANIEL SMITH Essentials 5 ml Watercolor Set. The Essentials Set is a split primary with two sets of primary colors, a cool triad (Hansa Yellow Light, Quinacridone Rose, and French Ultramarine) and a warm triad (New Gamboge, Pyrrol Scarlet, and Phthalo Blue (Green Shade).
Gray Titanium mixed with colors from the Essentials Watercolor Set
Below is the diagram showing what colors are mixed with what. The rectangles that show “+GT” are the two-color mix plus the addition of Gray Titanium. This shows the softening of the mixed color, which you can compare to the straight two-color mixes.
This Gray Titanium mixing grid diagram showing what colors were mixed for each rectangle using colors from the Essentials Watercolor Set.
For example, compare rectangle NG + HYL [New Gamboge mixed with Hansa Yellow Light] to rectangle HYL + NG + GT which has Gray Titanium mixed in.
So how does our Gray Titanium compare with our Buff Titanium?
Both colors are unique to DANIEL SMITH and are made with slightly different versions of PW 6 (Buff Titanium is PW 6:1). They both have the same properties – granulating, semi-transparent, non-staining and excellent lightfastness. Both have a creaminess quality, but Gray Titanium granulates with gray, and Buff Titanium granulates with a light tan or buff.
