Hey everyone! I wanted to share a fun video today. I recently got these Marie’s Masters watercolors from Jerry’s Artarama online. I’m not sure where else they’re sold, possibly Amazon. They’re a bit hard to find, but they’re Chinese artist grade watercolors.
These are my first artist grade watercolors, and I wanted to try them out and see what they’re like. I opened the tubes and filled my empty watercolor pans and let them dry for a few weeks before reactivating them for this test. The colors are beautiful! I learned a few things while researching the pigments that I note in the video, but mostly I just wanted some nice watercolors that work well, have good color on the page, and spread nicely. However, for those of you interested, there are many single pigment colors, and the lightfast ratings are excellent overall.
The colors are rich and vibrant. I did a couple of paintings to show you how they perform in real life. In the first painting, I did a pot of lavender and played around with dropping in different colors. In the second painting, I added more layers to see how the paints performed with layering.
Overall, I think this gave a good impression of the colors. I dipped into pretty much all of them for these two paintings. Hopefully, this video is helpful in giving you an idea of how these paints actually work.
I also wanted to test was how the colors looked when dropped into wet colors. I did six circles of different colors and then dropped in some colors into those circles.
One thing to note is that the Ivory Black seemed a little difficult to get to full strength, but a second dip definitely helped with the pigment concentration.
One thing I really love about these paints is how easy they are to pull and how bright they are on the page. I didn’t need a ton of paint for it to show up nicely. Overall, these paints were a pleasure to work with.
I definitely want to do a future video comparing these paints to my other palettes and using the same painting but with each palette to see how the colors compare.
Anyway, that’s it for today! I hope you enjoyed this video, and until next time, keep creating!