Watercolor Half Pans

Spatter or drop a brushload of Buff Titanium into a moist wash and enjoy the pigment displacement, it is especially effective used that way to make clouds in the sky. Unique to DANIEL SMITH, Buff Titanium resembles the ecru shades of sand and antique lace and simulates the porous texture of an eggshell. It is a most welcome neutral, with its’ semi-transparent to opaque, non-staining properties. Pre-mix Buff Titanium with Quinacridone Rose or Perinone Orange for subtle hues and matte surfaces ideal for the velvety petals of your favorite flowers. Mix with Indigo or Van Dyke Brown to create slate-colored shadows and soft feathers. Glaze a dried landscape with a misty, atmospheric mood.

Cleaner, more transparent and brighter in chroma than Cadmium Yellow Light, this is a high-tinting, organic pigment. Hansa Yellow Light is considered the ‘perfect yellow’, offering more control when mixing. Painters admire the purity of this primary pigment and ability to adjust its temperature while avoiding a gray from a hidden complement. Think of a yellow pepper.

Cadmium Yellow Medium Hue, a mid- toned, slightly red yellow is perfect to add heat, energy and a focus in any painting. Mixed wet into wet with Cerulean Blue you will have a vast array of textured greens in various tones depending on the color balance and amounts of water, from dusky shadow greens to vibrant spring greens. It disperses beautifully in water for smooth, rich washes.

Hansa Yellow Medium is a high-tinting, organic pigment. Considered the ‘perfect yellow’, Hansa Yellow Medium offers more control when mixing. Painters admire the purity of this primary pigment and adjust its temperature while avoiding a gray from a hidden complement. Think of a yellow pepper.

Kissed with a touch of orange, this is a pure chroma color with high-tinting, organic pigments. Hansa Yellow Deep is considered the ‘perfect yellow’, a fact which offers more control when mixing. Painters can admire the purity of this primary pigment and adjust its temperature while avoiding a gray from a hidden complement. Think of a yellow pepper.

Pyrrol Scarlet is permanent, semi-transparent to semi-opaque and medium staining, this fire engine red is cleaner than Cadmium or Permanent Red. It is a modern synthetic-organic pigment. While close in value to its Perylene cousin, it disperses more evenly and is less granular.

Permanent Alizarin Crimson blends pigments to produce an exceptionally lightfast red with true Alizarin Crimson character and versatility. Like classic Alizarin, it is vibrant, medium staining and very transparent, with the undeniable advantage of permanence. Try a rich and bold application or a blush of crimson color in a light wash, we know you’ll love this beautiful shade.

Quinacridone Rose, with its red-violet color, lends itself to fabulous purples. Try with Indigo for deep dusty purples, or Indanthrone Blue for rich, clear purples. Quinacridone Rose can be mixed with Quinacridone Sienna or Burnt Orange in dilute wash states to create fleshtones or convincing sunsets. Highly durable and extremely transparent, all the DANIEL SMITH Quinacridone colors excel in vivid clarity and intensity.

Like the blooms of its namesake flowering vine, Wisteria is a delicate, red-leaning lavender. Similar in color to Ultramarine Red but with different properties, this non-granulating and non-staining color paints smoothly and lifts easily. Wonderful for painting orchids and other florals.

This exciting blend mixes Quinacridone Rose and Ultramarine Blue. The blue settles as the rose floats, creating a vibrant, dimensional purple. For those artist artists who always mix their own purples, this unique, otherwise unattainable separation is worth exploring. Juxtapose Rose of Ultramarine with pure Phthalo Blue for fun and effect.

Water frees this amazing three-pigment blend to perform miracles. Watch and wait as Anthraquinoid Red floats, Ultramarine Blue settles and Viridian grays the resulting violet color. Selectively blot and lift a surface wash to expose delicate blue-greens. A description of the fascinating light and dark washes can never match a personal experience! Use Moonglow in shadows and as a silhouette pigment and enjoy its reaction to salt application in background washes. Its neutral tinting property makes it effective with almost all the DANIEL SMITH watercolors. Try introducing the Luminescent Interference pigments to areas of wet, damp or dry Moonglow. Look to Undersea Green as a companion pigment. And try a Moonglow sky and long shadows on sunset snow scenes.

A smooth gray-mauve in light washes, Shadow Violet displays a fascinating granulation when used more thickly. Deep warm violet in mass tone, it reveals a slight orange glow in thin applications. Its transparency makes it a great choice for glazing and it’s ideal, of course, for conveying the subtleties of shadows.

DANIEL SMITH Indigo formula mixes Indanthrone Blue with Lamp Black for an extremely lightfast, intense dark that closely matches true Indigo. Transparent, yet high in tinting strength, this Indigo leaves a gentle faded blue denim stain when blotted from a damp state paint. Blueberries, blackberries and plums are a few subjects to play with using this technique. Use Indigo wherever dusty purples are desired. Indigo evokes a feeling of atmospheric depth used for expressive, moody skies. Try flowing short strokes of Indigo into water, add touches of Sepia and Quinacridone Burnt Orange to create branches and birch trees. Historically Indigo, used since the early Egyptian times, has been a very important blue dye in fabrics as well as art materials, though not lightfast like DANIEL SMITH’s Indigo Watercolor. Natural Indigo is a deep blue colorant named anil. It is obtained from the sprigs of the indigofera plant. In the late 1600’s, the major source of indigo was the French West Indies, where large crops of indigofera was grown and harvested just before the plant bloomed. Once picked, the plant was processed in vats where it was water filtered, then dried into cakes for export.

Sodalite, with a distinctive deep blue color is one of the components of Lapis Lazuli and very rare. DANIEL SMITH Sodalite is the finest quality and deepest blue that comes from Greenland and the flanks of Italy’s Mt. Vesuvius. In watercolor, the inky color of this semi precious stone granulates as it dries, layering a blue-black textural surface on a smooth blue-gray undertone. Low staining, lightfast and semi-tranparent, Sodalite creates a three-dimensional quality as it dries.

Ultramarine Blue plots cooler and bluer than the more saturated French Ultramarine. Temperature aside, both blues have equal permanence, lightfastness and transparency. Ultramarine Blue is slightly less granular in concentrated washes. For less saturation, sedimentation and cost, use Ultramarine Blue straight, for vibrant crayon-like color or mixed with a cool red for dark, effective neutrals.

For cool, clean staining shadows and reflected light on windows, super staining, super transparent Phthalo Blue is a popular pure chroma organic pigment. Mix with Hansa Yellow for luminous greens.

DANIEL SMITH Lavender is a beautiful periwinkle blue, and quite different from other blues. This semi-transparent lavender blue has beautiful granulation, and lifts easily. In addition to being an excellent floral color, Lavender suggests certain shades of faded denim.

A superb mixing color. Think of Cerulean Blue as a cleaner, brighter, and slightly warmer alternative to the Cerulean Blue Chromium. A bit less green, it’s a truer blue that will be a versatile component of any palette.

Beautiful on its own, and especially so when mixed with a transparent pigment, this sky blue inorganic pigment is granular and medium-light in value. Highly permanent and extremely low-staining, Cerulean Blue creates exciting granulation and settling washes. A drop of Cerulean Blue into a damp wash such as Burnt Sienna creates a halo effect around the more dense Cerulean. This is especially effective when Quinacridone Gold or Quinacridone Burnt Orange are used in the moist underpainting. This technique is great for rendering lichen and Spanish Moss. Add Buff Titanium, Undersea Green and touches of Lunar Black – each a DANIEL SMITH exclusive – and the creative fun truly begins! For a misty landscape or that dusky quality on eggplant, grapes and plums, think Cerulean as a mixer.

A predictable non-staining teal blue with muscle and the presence to stand alone, but when used in a glaze or wash it blends with incredible ease. Because of it’s slight granulation you can achieve multi-layers and tone on tone effects to delight and surprise with each addition or stroke.