Testing the new special edition Schminke Gold watercolor paints

   Gold is a tricky material to use. It can feel delicate and light or weighty and clumpy. It can reflect light creating a wonderful glow or make an image appear flat and heavy. It can be used to highlight, add detail or create a luxurious background. There is a scale between the ethereal and the kitsch. Hitting the right note, finding balance between one's work and the addition of gold, can be delicate. This is one of the reasons that although I admire it when I see it done well you won't find a lot of gold in my previous work.

   I own three different golds which I will do a comparison of in a future post but for now I would like to review the new limited edition gold palette from Schminke Horadam (this is not a sponsored post).

  The colors themselves turned out very nice compared with gold watercolors I have used in the past. They are relatively rich in pigments which means that they are consistent in their coverage and color. I checked them in both shade and sunlight and they are visible in both contexts.

I was hoping that I would be able to do tone in tone paintings using only this palette but unfortunately there seems to be too little contrast. The two lightest colors are also almost to light unless used for highlights.

I think the addition of either a prussian blue, burnt umber, or even a burnt sienna would probably round out the palette nicely. I will try one of these to see if I can add depth and detail to the jellyfish attempt.

One last observation of these metallic colors is that they do not respond significantly to salt. The Leporello featured in the last post was comprised of backgrounds using a salt technique. Only a couple of the pigments responded well and the golds responded very poorly. But that doesn't really matter, it was more a point of curiosity anyway.

Have you tried Gold paints? Do you like them? What benefits or shortcomings have you observed?

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