Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Blue Watercolor Review: A Palette Essential
Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Blue (PB29) is one of the essential colors on my watercolor palette. This affordable blue produces dramatic granulation, lifts easily, and mixes beautiful darks and near-blacks—especially when combined with Burnt Sienna.
Watercolor Essentials: Ultramarine Blue (PB29)
Ultramarine Blue is one of those colors that simply belongs on a watercolor palette.
It is relatively inexpensive — finally, a break — and I keep it on every palette I own.
Every one.
It is one of the bedrock colors in my painting process because it can go from a beautiful transparent blue to an extremely dark value, mixes some of my favorite neutrals, granulates beautifully, and lifts easily when things go sideways.
Which they do.
This is watercolor.
Why Ultramarine Blue Is So Useful
Ultramarine Blue is a red-leaning blue.
That warm bias makes it especially useful for mixing violets and purples. Add Rose Madder or another cool red and you can get some really beautiful violet mixtures without much effort.
Mix it with yellow, though, and things get a little less exciting.
Because Ultramarine already leans toward red, adding yellow brings all three primaries into the mixture. The result can quickly become muted, grayish, or muddy instead of producing a bright clean green.
Sometimes that is exactly what you want.
Sometimes it looks like swamp water.
Know the difference.
Ultramarine Blue Makes Fantastic Darks
Straight from the tube, Ultramarine Blue can get extremely dark.
On my completely unofficial darkness scale, I would give it a 10/10 when used at strong concentration.
That makes it incredibly useful when I need deep shadows or strong value contrast.
But the mixture I use constantly is:
Ultramarine Blue + Burnt Sienna
Together, these two colors create a beautiful near-black.
Change the proportions and you can push the mixture wherever you want. More Ultramarine and the dark moves cooler and bluer. More Burnt Sienna and it shifts warmer.
I almost never need to reach for tube black.
If I had to guess, probably 90% of the darkest darks in my paintings contain some combination of Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna.
That mixture is just that useful.
It creates a dark that still has life in it.
Black straight from a tube can sometimes look flat. Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna give you little temperature shifts and color variations inside the dark, which makes the painting much more interesting.
Does Ultramarine Blue Watercolor Granulate?
Oh yes.
Ultramarine Blue granulates like crazy.
It is one of the better granulating colors you can put on a basic watercolor palette, and you do not have to buy some exotic super-granulating specialty paint to get the effect.
Let it move through a wet wash and the pigment begins settling into the texture of the paper, creating those wonderful speckled and reticulated patterns watercolor does so well.
This is especially useful for:
- atmospheric skies
- mist
- shadows
- stone
- old architecture
- mountains
- water
- textured landscape passages
You can introduce just a little Ultramarine into a wash and let the pigment do the work for you.
I like paint that works.
Ultramarine Blue and Skies
Ultramarine makes beautiful skies, especially when you want something more atmospheric than perfectly smooth.
Because of the granulation, the wash often dries with subtle texture and variation.
That can make a sky feel softer, mistier, or more natural.
If I want a perfectly clean, even blue sky, I may reach for something else.
But if I want a sky with some movement?
Ultramarine is excellent.
Is Ultramarine Blue Staining?
Not very.
That is another big reason I recommend it to beginning watercolor students.
On good-quality watercolor paper, Ultramarine Blue is generally easy to lift after it dries. A damp brush, a little water, and some gentle encouragement can remove quite a bit of paint.
That gives you room to:
- soften edges
- lift highlights
- fix shapes
- lighten shadows
- correct mistakes
And beginners make mistakes.
So do professional artists.
The main difference is that eventually you get better at pretending they were intentional.
This is also why I emphasize good paper.
On quality watercolor paper, you have much more freedom to lift and adjust paint.
On junk paper?
Good luck.
Ultramarine Blue vs Cobalt Blue
Both colors live on every palette I own, but I use them differently.
Cobalt Blue is more balanced and cleaner for a wider range of mixtures.
Ultramarine Blue leans warmer, granulates more strongly, and gets much darker.
If I want a clean middle blue, I often reach for Cobalt.
If I want deep shadows, dramatic granulation, rich violets, or one of my Ultramarine-and-Burnt-Sienna dark mixtures?
Ultramarine wins.
I would not choose between them if I had room for both.
I want both.
Why I Recommend Ultramarine Blue to Beginners
Ultramarine checks almost every box I want in an essential watercolor paint.
It is:
affordable
easy to mix
very dark when concentrated
strongly granulating
relatively non-staining
easy to lift
useful for skies, shadows, landscapes, architecture, and dark mixtures
That is a lot of usefulness from one tube of paint.
And unlike some expensive specialty colors, you do not have to justify the purchase afterward.
Do You Need Ultramarine Blue?
For me?
Absolutely.
Ultramarine Blue is one of a handful of colors that appears on every watercolor palette I own.
It is a foundation color.
I use it constantly for darks, shadows, skies, violets, neutrals, granulation, and especially mixtures with Burnt Sienna.
If you are building a beginner palette, I would put Ultramarine Blue near the very top of the list.
It is useful.
It is forgiving.
It mixes beautifully.
It granulates like mad.
And, miracle of miracles, it is relatively cheap.
Ultramarine Blue is a watercolor essential.
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 Burnt Sienna — A granulating earth color and one of the workhorses on my palette, especially useful for landscapes, neutral mixtures, and colorful darks.
- Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue — A cool, green-leaning blue with beautiful granulation and noticeable opacity that I use for atmospheric effects, fog, charging wet washes, and cool accents over darker passages.
- 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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