Experience Liquitex Brilliant Purple: an electrifying vivid with a soft heart. Pop open a tube and let its pastel mid blue-purple depths illuminate your palette. Cool, vibrant and powerful: this is one of the bluest shades of violet you can experiment with. The fully opaque color contains two pigments: dioxazine violet (red shade) and titanium white. It’s the tint cousin of dioxazine purple, a pigment first synthesized from coal tar in the 1920s by the Hoechst company in Germany.

Uncap the lid and enter a world full of possibilities. Brilliant Purple is at the core of Illuminated Brights, our 2025 color trend that captures the atmosphere of after dark. The trend has a hypnotic dreamcore aesthetic, blending mystical deeps with near-neon brights. Think Tron meets Blink Twice: here the digital world meets the real, giving electrifying glimpses of the future.

HOW TO USE

Dip a brush into the enigmatic facets of Brilliant Purple and see where it can take you. On its own, it’s a color well suited to projects focused on the otherworldy: interplanetary spaces, visions inspired by sci-fi, constellations, extra-terrestrial skies and the cosmos. To build out real world scenes, use Brilliant Purple alongside grays and sludgy yellows for skies, cloudscapes and seascapes with interesting plays of light, depth and shade. Use it for botanical and fruit painting, particularly for highlights and water droplets.

On the palette, Brilliant Purple can be used to mix a universe of useful colors. Blending with yellows brings out the warmth of its red aspect, giving a range of interesting putty and flesh tones to use in portraiture and landscapes. Add an extra dash of titanium white for bold and vibrant opaque violet tints and ultra violets that demand attention. Or mix with sheer earth pigments to get deep semi-transparent results that seem to vibrate with warmth: ideal for shadow building. Dial up the blue aspects with phthalo blues and greens. Greens and Brilliant Purple mix well and make a selection of uniquely nuanced grays.

Want to mix Brilliant Purple acrylic paint from your own palette? Take a shot of Dioxazine Purple and add a small amount of Titanium White to get just the right level of tint.

IN THE ART WORLD

First patented as a pigment in 1928, Brilliant Purple has been celebrated by all kinds of creatives since then. From video artists to abstract painters, digital producers and designers of futurist light installations, it’s a color that captures the imagination and crosses borders. British artist (and long term Liquitex user) Ian Davenport, uses Brilliant Purple in his video pouring piece Cobalt Blue and Brilliant Purple (After Bonnard) (2020). Contemporary artist Bryan Lavelle uses the color on MDF board in a number of his abstract acrylic series, Tipping Point (2015). Innovative design team, Aglaé, founded in France by Sophie Hombert, has dreamt up an elixir to give a range of plants a brilliant purple phosphorescence. The studio has worked with research labs to create this mystery component, which they use to create unique light installations in all kinds of settings, including Disneyland’s Enchanted Kingdom.

Find Liquitex Brilliant Purple in Heavy Body, Soft Body, Acrylic Gouache, Acrylic Marker, Spray Paint and Basics Acrylic and Basics Acrylic Fluid. Try it and share with us on Instagram or Facebook for a chance to be featured.

ILLUMINATED BRIGHTS

Get set to go with the glow as the darkness comes alive with energy, punctuated with unexpected photoluminescence.

Immerse yourself in themes of cutting-edge technology, glow in the dark organic life, moonlight, luminescent chemicals, intelligent pigments, UV light and artificial intelligence. Here in the after-hours, saturated brights surge through the midnight shadows, while accents flare with pulsating neon. Turn a corner to discover a new dimension.

Want to use Brilliant Purple acrylic paint to create your own Illuminated Brights palette? Dial up the mystery by pairing with moody blue-blacks and dazzling pops of color that shine out of the dark. Try combining Brilliant Purple with Liquitex Ivory Black, Cobalt Blue, Bright Aqua Green, Fluorescent Pink and Yellow Medium Azo to bring the color story to life.