#colour swatching

“48”? Really?

For my birthday this year I received an extremely generous gift from my grandpa. He gave me a 24 half pan set of Schmincke Horadam Aquarell watercolour paints. These are professional grade watercolours so I thought that for this week’s blog post I would share the unboxing and swatching experience. I also share my initial thoughts on the paints after I used them to create two seascape paintings.

Receiving my Schmincke Horadam Aquarell 24 half pan set of watercolour paints

These professional grade watercolours were an extremely generous gift from my grandpa. He has always supported me in my artistic expression and was one of the first people to teach me the basics of drawing.

As a thank you for this amazing birthday gift I wanted to create a painting for my grandpa. His taste in art leans more towards landscapes than my normal figurative style. So I created two sunset seascapes using my brand new watercolour set for him to choose from.

The Specs of Schmincke Horadam Aquarell watercolour paints

One of the things that stands out to me about Schmincke Horadam Aquarell watercolour paints is that they use the same formula for their tubes as their pans. This is very appealing to me, as I really like the portability of the pan sets. I hate wastage and I feel like with watercolours from the tubes I often use way too much so the pan set is much more appropriate for my painting style.

In addition, these watercolours have excellent light fastness. This is something that I care about because I want my clients to be able to enjoy the artworks that they purchase for years to come.

My thoughts on the Schmincke Horadam Aquarell 24 half pan set of watercolour paints

My impressions of this paint set are very positive. The colour selection is lovely and really suits me. There are some beautiful jewel tones that really appeal to me, as I use them a lot in my figurative work. I rarely paint people using natural skin tones, but rather prefer to use bright vibrant colours like purples, pinks, turquoise and blue. In my opinion there is a particularly good selection of blues in this set and I tried out a lot of them in my seascapes.

The colours were very easy to reactivate with only a little water. They go onto the paper smoothly and seem ideal to use for layering as I like to do in my watercolour paintings. The paint is easy to control but also flows nicely.

Overall I am super happy with this watercolour paint set and can’t wait to create lots more watercolour paintings with them in the coming weeks.