This popular orange color is a mixture of Vermillion (Azo) with Yellow Mid Azo. It is a characteristic of Pigment Orange 36 that it enters readily into mixtures to produce a wide range of colors and in doing so add many good qualities to the resulting color such as greatly improved weather resistance which makes this color suitable for outdoor murals, non-toxicity, making it ideal to choose as an orange for a mural in a children’s play area, and good flow characteristics.

This helps the manufacturer when making the paint and also means that the color feels good on the brush. Vermillion is so good in mixtures that a wide range of reds and oranges are made with it for automotive paints and as a result it is one of the more commonly used colors for red and orange colored cars. The artist should always take notice when a color is popular for automotive use because paint is subject to more degradation from light and environmental conditions in a 10 year lifespan than a painting gets in 500 years indoors. If a color lasts well on a car then it can be considered absolutely permanent for most artists uses.

Permanent Orange has a wide range of uses for the artist from broad areas of pure color in graphical work to abstract art to landscape painting. All oranges are complementary of blue. A lighter orange with mix with a lighter blue to make soft light grays. A more intense orange like Permanent orange will also do delightful things with Cerulean Blue but it is equally at home mixed with deeper blues like ultramarine to make darker grays and other neutrals. It is a mark of the versatility of orange as a color that it can be used to create neutrals on the one hand and can also be added to earth colors to liven them with orange. A lot of arid areas of central, western and northern Australia have very intense red and orange ochres that need to be made by boosting the earth color from the tube with brighter colors such as Permanent Orange.