Kuretake ZIG GANSAI TAMBI watercolor set (36 Colour Set)

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Choosing Keeping's own take on this traditional Japanese painting material, this selection of 20 colours has been put together especially for depicting springtime blossoms and other botanical forms. I’m not sure how useful the metallics would be for everyday use and would probably recommend they were taken out of this kit and replace with some useful matte colours like a rose pink, a limey ‘spring’ green and a scarlet. The colours of traditional Japanese gansai sets are often different from those in Western watercolours. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolours have become quite popular among watercolourists and crafters so I was very curious to check myself what is going on with these watercolour sets.

While the color flows easily from the brush to the paper, they don’t flow much once they are on the paper. This makes very difficult to control the values of the work, while the final results lack the brilliancy and saturation that someone would expect from such brilliant and heavily saturated colour swatches as those at the photo above. Nihonga (literally Japanese painting or picture) is an art form rooted in centuries of Japanese cultures. Overall, I am spell-bounded by these beautiful gansai watercolours and would highly recommend them to any artists interested in trying Japanese watercolours. Best review I’ve seen watercolor paints since I’ve started using watercolors and producing art pieces.

When you add wet paint to paint that has started to dry, you get a liquid flow that pushes the paint into flower-like shapes. Neon Blue lacks ‘zing’ and is more like the ‘Prussian Blue’ in my Crawford and Black set, so I would rename it as such. The Green mix was slightly better, retaining the vibrancy of the green, producing a ‘minty’ green with a slight lustre. Traditional Japanese watercolour brushes are larger and need more space to avoid damaging the bristles. Gansai, Japanese watercolour paint, is particularly suited to those who seek to create their own nihonga paintings.

I’ll let you join my new Japanoisery School for being a pioneer and putting in the advance work, and for sharing.Kyoto and Nara, two of Japan’s former capital cities, are home to important temples and shrines and strongholds of intangible cultural heritage, such as the Kyoto textile weaving skills of Nishijin. The Japanese are good competition for the Brits when it comes to their love of tea, apparent in their colour naming! All colours are lightfast, so you can be assured that your paintings will remain as vivid as they were the day you painted them. Japanese watercolour - Gansai - is slightly more opaque and vivid water-based pigment when compared with traditional European watercolour, producing bold and vibrant gouache-like colour. These high performance paints offer artists luminous, vibrant colour that can be used for all kinds of art applications - whether you’re sketching, creating manga illustrations, hand lettering, watercolour painting and more.

Etegami is a perfect art form for beginners, requires no special talent and is guaranteed to be lots of fun! though that was the postage I had to pay, Never the less it arrived well packed in a ridged envelope, which I will recycle. Gansai have a glossier finish than Western watercolours, especially in areas where they are applied generously.I split these further into ‘wet mixes’ and ‘wet on dry base’ to see if the colours behaved differently and if so, how. Water dropper: this simple accessory allows you to dose water precisely in the compartments of your mixing palette. Rokusho - Green rust - this colour was traditionally made from a malachite pigment and was used for ancient buildings and sculptures in East Asia. To enable personalised advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. Often with Western watercolours, paints are famously transparent, while gansai is almost always perfectly opaque.