Starry Colors

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.

Love these colors!!! Apparently you get better results if you add a lot of water and move them around quite a bit. Love them!

Beautiful paints, but was given a used package!! I have been drooling over these colors since they were first released and they are absolutely gorgeous and well worth the wait, but I have to say, I’m not happy about receiving a used set!! If it was anymore used than this, I would have returned it, but I don’t appreciating full price for something someone already got to play with! It looked like someone just tried the paints with a small brush to try out ans decided it wasn’t for them and sent it back. I feel like Amazon should have a separate payment option for used items given at a discount and not be sold for full price or at least let the customer decide if they want to still purchase it after someone else tried it out. It’s not that big of a deal, just obviously super annoying. At the end of the day and in all honesty, I would have paid twice as much for these paint because I do love them so much! But I bought these with a gift card my mom sent to me for a birthday gift so that’s more or less the reason why I’m so annoyed with them being used already. The first few photos are of before I got to try them for myself and of the torn packaging as well. I decided that even though they were used, I still gave these 5stars because they are exactly as I was expecting and are absolutely gorgeous paints!! As most reviewers of these paints, have to agree that the extra pan for “water” is actually quite useless unless you’re ONLY using ONE color at a time because the pan is so small. I would have liked to see a whole extra color OR 6 colors WITH 6 extra empty pans, one for each color, but to add ONLY one pan when these colors require so much water to really strut their stuff, is just silly because it forces you to use an extra palette anyways. I thinks these colors would really pop if they were used on cold pressed/rough WC paper. I just used a random piece of cardstock to test them out really quickly. I can’t wait to make some real art with them!!

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

Los colores son magníficos y van a la perfección tanto sobre papel de color negro como sobre papel blanco, tenía miedo de que no fueran tan pigmentados y en papel blanco apenas se viera el brillo metálico, no es así, se ven perfectamente. Aunque sí que es verdad que hay que esperar alrededor de 20 días para que te lleguen, la relación calidad-precio lo compensa. Muy recomendados.

El producto es de muy alta calidad es mucho más de lo que esperaba los colores son realmente brillantes con una sola capa, es duradero y creo que la calidad por el precio está muy adecuada definitivamente lo compraría de nuevo

ottima resa del colore ,provati su carta da acquerello

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The colors are not as bright as in the picture but they are absolutely amazing, they are more desaturated and earthy which I prefer