• Buff Titanium pigment, a soft, warm off-white with excellent opacity and lightfastness. Known for its subtle, creamy undertones, it is ideal for oil, acrylic, and watercolor painting. Offers smooth blending, delicate tints, and natural warmth for skin tones, landscapes, and muted palettes. A versatile alternative to pure white for softer highlights. Finely ground for professional-quality applications. Available in various sizes.
  • Buff Titanium pigment tested in watercolor using honey, in oil, and mixed with tints of titanium white and lead white. The image showcases its warm, creamy off-white hue, soft opacity in watercolor, smooth blending in oil, and subtle tonal variations with white pigments. A naturally derived titanium dioxide pigment valued for its gentle tinting strength and use in soft, natural tones. High-quality Buff Titanium swatches displayed for comparison.
  • The colored forms have the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one direction. Most interesting, however, are the white forms, which clearly have been painted in layers, using brush strokes running in different directions. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms so that they appear to overwhelm the lines and the colors, which indeed they were doing, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space.
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Buff Titanium Pigment

Buff Titanium Pigment

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Description

Buff Titanium is a natural single-pigment, off-white color derived from titanium dioxide in its rutile form. Unlike pure Titanium White, Buff Titanium contains naturally occurring iron impurities, giving it a warm, creamy, and slightly yellowish hue. It has been processed and refined to remove excess minerals while retaining a soft, muted, and earthy tone, making it highly useful in painting and fine art applications.


Buff Titanium is prized for its subtle warmth, creating softer highlights and natural-looking light tones compared to stark white pigments. It has excellent opacity and tinting strength while maintaining a gentle, non-overpowering presence in mixtures. It is particularly useful for toning down high-chroma colors, creating warm neutrals, and achieving natural skin tones, landscapes, and organic textures.


History

Titanium dioxide pigments have been widely used since the early 20th century as non-toxic replacements for lead-based whites. The rutile form of titanium dioxide was developed as a stable, durable alternative to traditional whites, offering superior coverage, brightness, and permanence.


Buff Titanium itself emerged as an artist's pigment in the mid-20th century, valued for its naturalistic, soft tone. It became popular in fine art painting, particularly in watercolor, oil, and acrylic techniques, where its warmth and subtle opacity provided depth without the starkness of pure white. In the pictured artwork 'Tableau I' by Piet Mondrian, Titanium Rutile is used throughout to create the strong whites, beige, and light colors of the piece.


In historical contexts, similar natural earth pigments were used to achieve warm whites before synthetic titanium colors became available. Artists and craftsmen often mixed earth pigments like ochres and raw siennas with white chalks to create analogous hues for painting, frescoes, and manuscript illumination.



Pigment Information

Pigment Type: Synthetic (Inorganic), Titanium Dioxide (Rutile) with Iron Impurities

Suitable Mediums: Watercolor, Oil, Tempera, Acrylic, Encaustic, Cold Wax, Casein, Milk, Swedish Flour, Lime / Fresco

Lightfastness: Best (Highly stable and permanent)

Opacity: Opaque

Other Names: Unbleached Titanium, Warm Titanium White

Color Index Code: PW6:1

Image: 'Tableau I' by Piet Mondrian from the Kunstmuseum Den Haag