Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue Watercolor Review: The Blue I Didn’t Know I Needed
Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue (PB35) is a granulating, green-leaning blue with noticeable opacity and a moderate value range. I especially like it for charging into dark washes, creating atmospheric fog, adding granulation, and placing cool accents over darker passages.
Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue (PB35) is a color that took me a long time to appreciate. For years, it wasn’t exactly fighting for prime real estate on my palette.
Now I love it.
Why? Because Cerulean Blue does several things that most of my other blues simply can’t do.
What Makes Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue Different?
Cerulean Blue is a cool, green-leaning blue. It works beautifully alongside yellows and greens, making it especially useful for skies, foliage, atmospheric passages, and cool accents.
Start adding reds, however, and things can get ugly quickly. Since Cerulean already leans toward green, introducing red can produce a wonderfully lifeless mud. Sometimes that’s useful. Usually it looks like the color gave up on life.
Winsor & Newton’s version is also noticeably opaque compared with many of the transparent blues on my palette. PB35 is a granulating pigment, and this paint has enough body that it can sit visibly over other colors when applied more heavily.
It’s also not a particularly dark blue. Even at strong concentration, Cerulean Blue remains a middle-value color. I don’t reach for it when I need serious darkness.
That’s actually part of what makes it useful.
Using Cerulean Blue to Create Fog
I discovered one of my favorite uses for Cerulean Blue almost by accident while painting Machu Picchu.
Because of its opacity, Cerulean can sit over darker passages instead of disappearing completely into them. Dropped into a wet passage, it can create a wonderful hazy, foggy effect.
Look at the misty area toward the top of the painting. Cerulean Blue was dropped into the surrounding colors and allowed to move on its own. The lighter, semi-opaque pigment floats over the darker washes and creates atmospheric depth without having to paint every little wisp of fog.
Sometimes watercolor behaves better when you stop trying to control it.
Cerulean Blue Is Fantastic for Charging Color
This is probably my favorite use for Cerulean Blue.
What is charging?
No, we’re not talking about a football penalty.
Charging is simply dropping one color directly into another color while both are still wet. You don’t stir them together. You don’t attack them with a brush. You drop the color in and leave it alone.
That’s the important part.
Mix the same two colors together on your palette and you’ll get one color. Charge one into the other on the paper and you’ll often get something completely different: movement, separation, granulation, soft transitions, and unpredictable edges.
Cerulean Blue is one of my favorite colors for doing this.
Does Cerulean Blue Watercolor Granulate?
Yes. It definitely granulates. Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue creates beautiful granular texture as the pigment settles into the surface of the watercolor paper.
It also soaks into the paper really, really fast. Because of this, I don’t get particularly strong blossoms from Cerulean Blue compared with some of the other colors on my palette.
That’s one of the interesting things about this paint: great granulation doesn’t necessarily mean great blossoms.
Drop Cerulean into a dark wet passage and watch what happens. The pigment pushes, separates, granulates, and creates variations that would be almost impossible to reproduce by carefully mixing the colors beforehand.
It’s pure watercolor magic.
And yes, occasionally watercolor magic turns into watercolor disaster. That happens. Get over it. :)
Can You Use Cerulean Blue Over Dark Watercolor Washes?
Cerulean’s opacity also makes it useful later in a painting.
I’ll sometimes throw Cerulean Blue directly into or over a dark passage. Instead of disappearing completely, some of that lighter blue remains visible against the darker color.
That creates another layer of visual depth without requiring me to carefully paint around every lighter area from the beginning.
I’m generally looking for ways to make watercolor do more of the work for me. This is one of them.
Is Cerulean Blue Good for Mixing?
Here’s the strange part: I don’t use Cerulean Blue very much as a traditional mixing color.
I have other blues that are better workhorses for making greens, violets, grays, and dark mixtures.
For me, Cerulean Blue is an accent and effect color.
I use it to wake up dark passages, create atmospheric effects, charge into wet washes, add granulation, and create depth.
Back to American football: Cerulean Blue isn’t the quarterback getting all the camera time and highlights.
It’s the offensive lineman.
It quietly does a ton of work and rarely gets any credit.
But take away the offensive line and that quarterback is dead meat.
That’s pretty much how I feel about Cerulean Blue now.
Compare More Watercolor Essential Paints
No single watercolor pigment does everything. Some colors earn their place because they mix beautifully, some granulate, some lift easily, and others create effects that are difficult to reproduce with anything else. Explore more of the watercolor paints I use and compare how they behave:
- Winsor & Newton Cobalt Blue — A clean, foundational blue that is low staining, easy to lift, and extremely versatile for skies, water, shadows, and color mixing.
- Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Blue — A strongly granulating blue that creates beautiful texture, lifts easily, and mixes exceptionally rich darks and near-blacks with Burnt Sienna.
- Winsor & Newton Burnt Sienna — A granulating earth color and one of the workhorses on my palette, especially useful for landscapes, neutral mixtures, and colorful darks.
- Holbein Sap Green — My favorite natural-looking tube green, with strong granulation, wonderful blossoms, and the ability to create rich, colorful landscape darks.
- Turner Natural Rose Madder — A transparent, low-staining NR9 red that lifts easily and creates beautiful watercolor blossoms. I love how it behaves on paper, but its poor lightfastness means I use it more selectively than my foundational colors.
Every watercolor pigment behaves differently on paper. My Watercolor Essentials reviews look beyond the color in the tube and focus on what actually matters when I’m painting: color bias, transparency, staining, lifting, granulation, blossoms, mixing behavior, and whether the paint really deserves space on my palette.
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Ryan Fox AWS, NWS, TWSA
Ryan Fox Painting
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