It's Back!

Torrit Greys

This week I got an announcement that the 2021 Torrit Grey has hit the shelves!  Years ago, I was befuddled by a similar promotion at the local art supply store, which promised me a free tube of Torrit Grey paint if I bought a certain amount of goods made by Gamblin. Nowadays, I am a huge fan, and eagerly await each year's release of Torrit Gray.  Here's the story...

Gamblin Artists Colors is one of the largest paint manufacturers in the US. Their factory uses an air filtration system made by a company called Torit. The air filters trap pigment dusts that escape into the air during the paint mixing process. Every spring, Gamblin cleans the dust out of its filters. Instead of dumping the pigment dust in a landfill, they use it to make a special paint, which they call "Torrit Grey". How cool is that?

Because the combination of pigments cleaned out of the filters is never the same from year to year, the color Torrit Grey is never the same either. Recently, Gamblin has started labeling the tubes of Torrit Grey with the year of manufacture. So now we can collect tubes from various "vintage years", if you will, just like we would collect wines from different vintage years. It's a limited edition pigment!

Not only is Gamblin's approach very earth-friendly, it has the added lure of the mysterious: You never know what the next batch will be like until you open it. It often tends toward green, because one particular pigment, Pthalo Green, has an extremely strong tinting strength. Sometimes it is a truer neutral gray, like the 2013 vintage shown below.

Torrit Grey is great mixed with other colors. In his book "Landscape Painting Inside & Out", Kevin Macpherson advocates for scraping your palette as you work, and stashing the scrapings on the side, to be used in mixing other colors. Many painters call this their "mud". Kevin even suggests buying empty tubes and filling them with your mud, rather than discarding it at the end of a painting session...another great recycling approach. Here's to more earth-friendly ideas!