HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

 

Seijaku: Calm in Chaos

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Earlier this year, I did a blog piece about the intense energy of the Year of the Fire Horse (you can read it here). When I recently came across the word Seijaku (静寂), it hit me immediately: this is the exact antidote we all need for the chaos of this year.

To bring this concept to life, Shy Artist mulled raw ultramarine blue pigments into watercolor medium, creating a lovely, deep color perfectly suited for the Japanese Kanji for Seijaku. You can get this printable calligraphy for free at the Serenity of the Mind Store. Hang it on your wall as a daily reminder of calm in the midst of chaos.

But what does Seijaku truly mean? It is much deeper than just sitting in a quiet room.

The Art of Energized Calm

In the West, we often view peace as something passive—the absence of noise. Seijaku, however, is a dynamic, energized calm. It is the still point at the center of a spinning wheel, or the quiet eye of a storm.

Its origins run deep into Japanese history and culture:

• The Way of the Samurai: Centuries ago, samurai trained extensively in this mindset to maintain absolute composure, clarity, and decisive action in high-pressure situations and the literal chaos of battle.

• The Architecture of Stillness: In medieval Japan, tea master Sen no Rikyū designed tea houses with deliberately low doors, forcing guests to bow, slow down, and leave the hectic world behind. The spaces were acoustically crafted so that sound was absorbed, creating a silence that wasn't empty, but "pregnant with awareness."

• The Sound that Deepens Silence: In Japanese Zen gardens, a single drop of water fills a bamboo tube (shishi-odoshi) until it tips, strikes a rock with a sharp clack, and returns to stillness. That lone sound doesn't break the tranquility—it makes the silence audible.

Carrying Calm with You

Seijaku is closely related to ma (間), the Japanese concept of the space between objects or the pause between musical notes. It emphasizes creating purposeful pockets of space in our daily routine.

When life’s pressures mount, our instinct is to rush, react, and try to fix everything at once. Seijaku teaches us that inner calm comes from doing less, not more. It is about acceptance—not surrendering to chaos, but accepting that chaos is a natural part of the flow of life. When you stop resisting it, it loses its power over you.

By practicing this active calm, you get five incredible benefits:

1. Reduces Stress & Anxiety: It allows you to step back and observe your thoughts without letting them overpower you.

2. Increases Focus: It trains the mind to remain entirely present on a single task.

3. Improves Sleep Quality: Quietly reflecting and letting go of the day's worries prepares the body for rest.

4. Boosts Emotional Well-being: It acts as a daily "reset button," allowing you to move forward with reason rather than raw emotion.

5. Enhances Creativity: Quieting the external noise creates an empty space for intuition, new ideas, and watercolor inspiration to surface like koi rising in a still pond.

True silence isn't the absence of sound—it's the presence of everything you've been too noisy to hear.

The next time life feels overwhelming, remember Seijaku. Take a deep breath, retreat into your inner sanctuary, and move forward with quiet strength.

References & Deep Digs

If you want to read more about the history and daily practice of Seijaku, check out the wonderful resources that helped inspire this post:

• Umbrex: Tools for Thinking – Seijaku: The Art of Energized Calm in the Midst of Chaos. This guide breaks down how dynamic tranquility helps us balance a heavy load of work and family without feeling completely scattered.

• Medium / Personal Growth – The Wisdom of Seijaku. A beautiful personal look at using "active calm" to pause, embrace reality instead of fighting it, and clear out both physical and mental clutter.

• Zen Principles Glossary – A deep dive into the Japanese aesthetic traditions, explaining how zazen meditation makes this inner stillness portable enough to carry right into daily traffic or hard conversations.

• Core Confidence Lifestyle – 5 Benefits of Seijaku Meditation. An excellent breakdown of the historical links to ancient samurai training and how the practice scientifically reduces stress and sharpens focus.

• Satori Daily – The Fullness Found in Complete Stillness. A fascinating history of how tea master Sen no Rikyū architecturally built pockets of profound quiet into his 15th-century tea houses.

The History of Payne’s Gray

 

The History of Payne’s Gray

I am mulling Payne’s Gray for a background and also for the edging of some plain speech bubbles that are going to be white in the center. Hand-mulling your own paint takes a lot of patience, but it allows you to control the exact texture and binder ratio for specific projects. For these speech bubbles, I needed an outline color that has a strong presence but isn't as harsh or flattening as a straight carbon black. I hope you enjoy this video and tell me how you use Payne’s Gray in your projects in the comments below.

I finished mulling one of my recipes for Payne’s Gray. It came out like a dark Navy Blue, and I thought I failed until I saw a video by Paul Clark on YouTube. When you are working on a glass slab, raw pigment mixtures can look completely different in bulk than they do when spread out in a fine layer on paper. Here is the link on YouTube so you can see it for yourself: How to Paint a Fisherman in Watercolour. In that video I saw that I didn't fail because he showed side by side how each company's Payne's Gray looks different. It was a huge relief to see his side-by-side demonstration because it proves that Payne's Gray isn't a single pure pigment—it’s a convenience blend that shifts from stormy blue to charcoal depending on the brand.

Payne's Gray: Detailed Research Summary

1. Who Was William Payne?

Payne's Gray was created in the late 18th century by the British watercolorist and tutor William Payne (born 1760). He was a pioneer who moved watercolor away from rigid, mapped lines into a softer, more atmospheric style. Like a historic predecessor to modern step-by-step painting instructors, he popularized quick, effective textures, such as using a split wet brush for foliage or the side of a dry brush for rocks. While serious critics of his era sometimes dismissed his techniques as "too easy," his methods opened up the joy of watercolor to everyday students.

2. The Original Recipe vs. Modern Blends

William Payne originally developed the color as a less intense alternative to stark black for his students. Pure black can create "dead spots" in a painting, whereas a mixed neutral keeps the shadows vibrant.

• The Historic Recipe: A mix of Prussian Blue (or Indigo), Yellow Ochre, and Crimson Lake.

• The Modern Recipes: Today, because it is a "convenience blend," manufacturers use entirely different formulas. Most combine a blue (like Ultramarine, Phthalo, or Indigo) with a carbon-based black (like Lamp Black or Ivory Black). Some lines even mix Ultramarine with Burnt Sienna or add a touch of red/violet to balance the temperature and mimic the original tone.

3. Why Every Watercolor Company's Payne's Gray is Different

Because there is no single, standard "Payne's Gray pigment," every paint manufacturing company creates its own custom formulation. This means buying a tube from one brand will give you a completely different visual result than a tube from another.

• Winsor & Newton: Leans toward a traditional, very clean, ink-like blue-gray. It uses Phthalo Blue and a touch of violet to keep the undertone crisp and non-granulating.

• Daniel Smith: Leans toward a dark, earthy storm blue. They include Yellow Ochre in their mixture, which gives it a moody, granular character that replicates the original historic recipe's warmth.

• Schmincke Horadam: Known for using a granulating black base, resulting in a deep indigo-shadow look where the pigments visibly separate on textured paper.

• Maimeri Blu: Uses a highly transparent dual-pigment blend of Ultramarine and Lamp Black. When diluted, the bright blue easily breaks away from the black at the edges of the wash.

• Holbein: Formulas vary, but they often lean far more neutral and desaturated, acting almost like a soft charcoal or a cool black rather than a bright blue-gray.

4. Visual Characteristics, Mixing, & Permanence

In heavy masstone applications, Payne's Gray looks nearly black, but it reveals beautiful blue or lilac undertones when diluted into a soft wash. Historically, it was used extensively to create atmospheric perspective, giving objects in the middle distance a sense of depth, fog, and distance.

When mixing on your palette, keep in mind that because it already contains two or three pigments, adding further colors can quickly lead to earthy, muted "muddy" tones. However, this is actually an asset when you need to paint deep, leafy foliage, shadow cast across a landscape, or moody, wet-on-wet stormy skies.

If you want Serenity of the Mind's Payne Gray you can get it at store.serenityofthemind

Resources

• Video Reference: Clark, Paul. "How to Paint a Fisherman in Watercolour." YouTube. Watch here.

• Historical Article: Hatch, Evie. "The Unexpected History of Payne’s Grey." Jackson's Art Blog. (Updated March 31, 2026).

• Biographical Overview: "Meet William Payne: The Painter Behind Payne’s Grey Pigment." WatercolorPainting.com.

• Encyclopedia Reference: Wikipedia contributors. "Payne's grey." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

• meta description: Why does Payne’s Gray vary so much between brands? Discover the history of William Payne's formula and how to successfully hand-mull your own custom recipes.

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Mulling Payne's Gray From Pigments to Paint

 Mulling Payne's Gray From Pigments to Paint 

[Temporary Note: Google updates have briefly frozen our play button. Please click on the YouTube logo in the corner of the video screen to watch it directly on YouTube!]

I am mulling Payne’s Gray for a background and also for the edging of some plain speech bubbles that are going to be white in the center. I hope you enjoy this video and tell me how you use Payne’s Gray in your projects in the comments below.

Who was William Payne?

Did you know this color is named after a real painter? William Payne came into the world in 1760. He started out as a draughtsman for the Board of Ordnance, making careful, technical drawings. It was steady work, but not exactly inspiring. Eventually, he turned toward art in London, where he began to explore landscapes.

At that time, most draughtsmen were focused on topographic accuracy—drawing land as if it were a map. Payne wanted more. He leaned into a softer, more poetic way of capturing scenes. Instead of just showing what a place looked like, he wanted to show how it felt.

An 18th-century pioneer

Payne loved to experiment. One of his biggest changes was dropping the pen outlines that most watercolorists used. That gave his paintings a looser, more natural look. He also worked on ways to show sunlight and atmosphere—those subtle effects that bring a painting to life. These ideas made watercolor feel more expressive and approachable. In many ways, Payne helped move watercolor from being a tool for draftsmen into being a respected art form.

Along with the creation of Payne’s Gray, he is also credited with the technique of splitting a wet brush to make different marks for foliage, and using the side of a dry brush to make rock-like textures in the foreground (perhaps we can think of him as an 18th-century Bob Ross?). He was criticized by the "serious" painters of the time for apparently reducing painting to a step-by-step, easy-to-use approach. It should be noted, however, that his mark-making methods were not new. Chinese landscape painters were certainly using these techniques with their brushes in the 15th century, if not long before.

He showed his work at the Royal Academy, the leading stage for artists in England, and even earned the respect of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Academy’s president.

The evolution of the pigment recipe

Payne’s Gray is a dark blue-grey color used in painting. It is usually very dark in masstone, and reveals very blue undertones when diluted. It was most likely developed by Payne while trying to produce a mixer that was less intense than black, which was the traditional mixer.

Because the shade is a composite color, many different recipes have existed over the years:

• The original late 18th-century mixture: Prussian Blue (though some sources say Indigo), Yellow Ochre, and Crimson Lake.

• The 20th-century variation: A recipe listed in the 20th century called for Indigo instead of Prussian Blue.

• The modern mix: Today, it is often a mixture of blue (like ultramarine, phthalocyanine, or indigo) and black, or of ultramarine and burnt sienna. Because a ready-mixed Payne's Gray varies from range to range, its hue is not consistent across brands.

Interestingly, Payne's Gray has long been considered similar to another color called "neutral tint," as both are made of indigo, ochre, and ivory black in watercolor, just in different proportions. The main difference is that Payne's gray has a more lilac shadow, and therefore a warmer tint. However, it does not have significant resistance to light—over time, that lilac shadow will fade, transforming the color into a neutral grey.

Payne’s Gray in action

A significant number of William Payne's works include the shade, such as his painting Smuggler’s Cave. The shade is primarily used for atmospheric perspective to create the impression of distance, and in Payne's own work, it was primarily applied to the middle distance to produce this effect.

The vast majority of watercolor, oil, and acrylic ranges carry Payne’s Gray today, which is evidence of its continued demand. It is a beautiful, versatile neutral that is richer than black and softer than straight grey.

Next time you see that beautiful bluish‑grey in your palette, think of William Payne. He wasn’t afraid to break habits and try something new. His name may live on through a pigment, but his real gift was showing us that watercolor could be freer, softer, and more expressive than anyone thought at the time.

Resources

• Jackson's Art Blog: The Unexpected History of Payne’s Grey by Evie Hatch (Updated March 31, 2026).

• Watercolor Painting: Meet William Payne: The Painter Behind Payne’s Grey Pigment

• Wikipedia: Payne's grey