Granulating Color

Beautiful colors with lovely finishes. It’s a wonderful quality I like this with wet on wet with some drop ins to finish and give it a nice color variations. It’s great for beginners to play with to learn water flow and color movement. Perfect for backgrounds of all kinds. I’ll be buying again ✨🌱

This review is for the 5 color Granulating Colors I palette. These are some of my new favorite granulating colors and I have quite a collection of Daniel Smith Primatek and Schmincke super granulated. These are extremely bold separators with a somewhat unpredictable final result depending on water saturation and paper. The photo here of swatch tests is on a cheap Mixed media journal from Walmart and they performed very well. The Aurora Violet behaves like an extreme imperial or ultramarine violet. And the Aurora Orange is somewhere between Daniel Smith Serpentine and Schmincke Desert Green, but these Kuretake are less predictable— it is truly fun and surprising to work with these. They are the epitome of what makes watercolor special! I always love Kuretake palettes but I hope they make a third set of granulators and keep the new granulating colors coming!

I have several sets of metallic watercolors, and this one is in a class all it's own. If I could only keep one, I wouldn't have a second thought about it: this would be it! Yes, I've got sets with quadruple the amount of color options, and sets with other special features this is missing...but the quality of these paints are the best I have tried to date. These paints handle well. They can lay down brighter and more opaque than generic paints. These are full pans!! Optionally removable to put into your dedicated palette if you roll like that. So they offer the kind of versatility that a serious artist needs. They don't have that chalky texture like cheapo paints. These are smooth and easy to use. I recommend, especially with metallic (but I actually do this with any pan water color) to keep a small mister spray bottle of water dedicated to your paint collection. Spray some water on the pans a couple minutes before you dip your brush in there. That activates the paint so that your brush is an immediate tool for painting, rather than trying to pull the double duty of delivering moisture to dried-solid paint before it becomes a tool for painting. Trust me, it just works better that way and you get better control. Plus, that has the net effect of being gentler on the brushes and might help your pans last longer. I have seen several dupe attempts at copying this set of paints. I did buy one from here on Amazon after I bought this...just because it has silver...and also I saw a dangerously close looking dupe as far as the packaging and presentation is concerned at the 'Lobby craft store yesterday (which also included a silver). I almost bought it, but nah, I figure there's honestly a good chance it would be the same manufacturer as the other dupe I bought (an all too common phenomenon in the world of store brand and generic brand crafting products--you buy the same thing several times over thinking it's a different product so best to just buy the name brand once). So my only honest complaint about this set is that it is just golds and whites...no good silver, and no coppers and bronzes etc. It doesn't have a full range of the expected, classic metallic pigments that one would desire--but what it does have are going to be the best rendition of metallic golds and whites!! So I think maybe it's best to have a limited palette, but have stellar delivery of what is offered than it would be to have what looks like a great range of colors...but only have a couple of them really perform well, and the rest be disappointing (which is often the case with store/generic brand stuff). I found this set through watching a YouTube video of a color along with an artist named Amy Cesari (she designs yearly planner coloring books). Just mentioning this in case you want to see a professional artist use this product. Often she will color one of her designs and then at the end she loads up a paintbrush with this exact paint, holds it over the completed page, and taps the brush with something (like a dry brush, or a pencil, whatever). So that creates an effect where fine splatters of the metallic paint rain down on the image. It's a beautiful effect. Bottom line: these are seriously good quality paints, and they're more expensive than some sets that look similar but those other sets are lacking in the qualities that these paints offer. Considering these are full pans, made in Japan, and perform so well, they're a great price! I would buy these again. I plan to purchase some of the other sets by this manufacturer, as a couple of them seem to be almost unique as far as the effects they offer. The fact that I saw a store brand obviously trying to copy the packaging for this very set when that store (or any other in my area) doesn't carry this brand of product might say it all. This is the one to get. This is a very special and delightful set of watercolors.

These are lovely watercolors...without the mess of sumi ink...lovely. Professional quality

cool, but not real practical, and a bit more expensive than their worth. The orange is cool and fun... Pink, red and blue too similar to each other to be useful. Purple is mostly just purple. Orange is the only one that's a really fun contrast.

These gem colors are highly pigmented, easy to blend, and seem to be of high quality. They are especially gorgeous on a high quality black paper. I’ll definitely be purchasing these again.

I love this paint! It is perfect for painting holiday cards. It goes on really smooth, has a nice shine and looks great. Highly recommend.

Love these watercolors! These are high quality paints. They have extremely vibrant pigment, blend well and dry beautifully.