Raw sienna is named after the Italian city of Siena, where iron-rich earth was quarried and ground into pigment since the Renaissance. As a skin tone it represents medium-dark complexions with warm red undertones.

Sienna carries the weight of the earth itself. It is the colour of skin that grounds and reassures — warm, deep, permanent. It has never gone out of fashion in portraiture.

Sienna appears in virtually every Old Master palette. Rembrandt used burnt sienna to build warm shadow glazes in portraits. In South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin portraiture, sienna forms the backbone of skin tone rendering.