Paint and Swatches
It was another watercolor week for me this week. I wrote just two weeks ago about how I was using watercolors to color some of my superhero talking head comics and then this week I bought two new watercolor sets to continue that project. I got six more comics/heads done. That makes forty two out of fifty two done for 2026’s webcomics.
I actually have another twelve or so of these talking superhero heads finished that I make a few years ago. I never posted those twelve so I really could add them to the forty two I have now and be done with it for the year but I’m having a lot of fun making them. So I think I’ll just keep going with them for a while.
The first new set of watercolors that I bought were from eBay. They are a set of natural paint pigments. They cost me $16 and the set I bought was a set of ten half pans but the seller upgraded me to a set of nineteen half pans of paint.
A watercolor half pan is a little rectangle of paint that comes in an open topped plastic box/pan that’s about one half inch wide by three quarters of an inch long and three eights of an inch tall. You wet the top of the paint, wet your brush, and dip or rub the top of the paint with the brush to load some pigment onto your brush.
This is basically how pan watercolors work. They’re hard to begin with but wetting them softens them up so you can use them. How much pigment you get on your brush depends on how much pigment is in the water you apply. A lot of water means not much pigment and light colors. A little bit of water means more pigment and stronger color.
I’ll give you some of the copy that was in the eBay listing.
“These pigments are made from finely ground iron oxides, herbs, and spices. Create stunning, eco-friendly art using nature’s own color palette.”
Here are some of the descriptions of the colors:
– Cinnamon: Rich brown hues with a warm, earthy tone.
– Moringa: Lush green for a fresh, organic feel.
– Turmeric: Bright yellow, perfect for adding warmth.
– Cacao: Deep chocolate brown for richness.
– Chili: Bold orange for striking highlights.
– Spirulina:Vibrant blue-green, ideal for unique shades.
– Beet Root: Beautiful magenta for eye-catching effects.
– Iron Oxides: Variety of earthy tones (red, yellow, black).
I like to try out new art supplies so these seemed like they’s be fun to get. Especially since I’d been working with watercolors lately. After I got them the first thing I did was to swatch the colors. That’s always my first step with a new set of paints, markers, or anything that makes colors.
In swatching these the first thing that I noticed is that they are not highly pigmented. That makes sense because they are made with natural elements like oregano, ginger, and mango. Most of the colors are light and on the brown and yellow side. This suited me well since I was making faces.
The most pigmented colors were the Iron Oxides. There are three of these: dark, medium, and light, and those three have a lot of pigment compared to the others. Spirulina (greenish), Beet Root (reddish), B. Pea (blueish), and Cacao (brownish) have the second most pigments of the batch. It was good to have those colors.
Watercolor is a medium of layered washes and that’s what I did with these. Since I was doing superhero heads I saved the brightest and most pigmented colors for their masks and used the lightly pigmented colors for their skin tones. I got some interesting skin tones with all the different light browns and yellows. I think the faces came out well.
One more note about this set is that the colors have some texture to them. I’m guessing it’s because they use natural colors that the pigment isn’t always as evenly dissolved and spread out in the paint. So the Beet Root one has flecks of red in it, the Oregano one has some flecks of brown and so on. It varies from paint to paint. I like texture so this if fine with me.
By the way this watercoloring was all done over a black India ink drawing of the face. So it’s a little different than a drawing with just watercolors. The black line does a lot of the work of holding things together.
I also got a second new set of pan watercolors this week. This one was more typical. It was the Gansai Tambi 12 Color Set !! Nuance Color. They are a Japanese brand of watercolor and I have another set by them. I bought it because I liked the colors in the ad.
The first thing I noticed when I got the package was that these are not really watercolors but gouache (a watercolor with opaque white added to the paint). The package said to use them at full strength for gouache and water them down for watercolors. I actually like gouache and am better with it than a regular watercolor but I wan’t expecting that. I somehow missed it when reading about the set online.
I swatched them first thing and there are some nice colors in the set. But as the name of the set “Nuance Colors” implies these are not a primary set but a bunch of colors that you can add to an already existing palette. It was a little bit of a struggle to make a superhero face with these colors.
Superhero costumes and masks are usually made up of strong primary colors. This set has three reds but they are a pink and two darker reds. Cobalt blue makes for a pretty good main blue but there is no yellow. The greens are both very light. The two beiges worked okay for skin tones.
I think it was because I was trying out the set that I insisted on only using the colors form this one set. I only made two faces with it and they came out fine. I did use another set (with sparkly paints) for the backgrounds. But this is a set I will use in conjunction with the main set of Gansai Tambi paints I already have.
So there you go. A little bit more watercolor action for you. Two new sets of paints as I add to my collection of watercolors.